The greatest acquisitions in advertising history tend to look slightly crazy at the time and completely inevitable about a decade later.

When Microsoft paid $26.2 billion for LinkedIn in 2016, the price struck many observers as steep and the strategic logic as fuzzy. A software company buying a professional networking site? It seemed like the kind of deal that gets made when a chief executive has more cash than patience. Nearly ten years on, that purchase increasingly looks like the moment Microsoft bought the identity layer of business-to-business marketing — the one asset that would later let it connect everything else together.

The company filed earnings on Wednesday that put numbers on the machine it has been assembling: revenue of $90 billion for the quarter, up 18 percent from a year ago, with cloud business climbing 27 percent to more than $59 billion. Those figures describe the whole enterprise rather than its marketing estate specifically, but they suggest the scale of the platform that its holdings now feed.

Map Microsoft's properties against the way a business actually buys something and the picture becomes difficult to unsee. Professional identity sits with LinkedIn. Discovery and research increasingly run through Copilot and Bing. The media that reaches those buyers is sold by Microsoft Advertising. The customer relationship that follows is managed in Dynamics. All of it takes place inside Teams and Microsoft 365, the software in which the working day is actually spent.

(A single landlord holding identity, discovery, media and the customer record is the walled-garden problem that has long shadowed Google and Meta, except wider.)

No other company comes close to that spread. Google has search and media but no professional identity graph and no serious customer relationship management software. Salesforce and Adobe own the customer relationship and much of the marketing technology stack, yet neither has media reach or a search index or anything resembling LinkedIn.

For business-to-business marketers, this cuts two ways at once. One owner across identity, intent and the workplace could mean a single coherent view of the buyer and less of the fragmentation that has plagued measurement for years. It could also mean that marketers increasingly reach their own customers by renting access from a single landlord — which is an older question in a newer form.

Microsoft has always been the company the industry asks the too-powerful question about, from the years when Office ran in every building on earth to the antitrust fights that followed. The difference now is that the question belongs to business-to-business marketers specifically, and they have not yet started asking it out loud.

Original story published in The Drum: "Has Microsoft quietly become the most important company in B2B marketing? | The Drum"