Some 20th century artefacts have largely gone from the modern office, the typewriter and fax machine among them. They have been swallowed by computerisation and the internet. One dead-tree tradition endures: the business card.
Despite strenuous efforts by mobile phonemakers and software companies to replace them with online contacts, shared like some invisible handshake by Bluetooth or wireless, business cards remain. As long as you remember to carry them, nothing has improved on the ritual of exchanging rectangles stamped with your identity and details.
Business cards are light, portable and open. No need for compatible platforms and software to swap them - you hand them over, perhaps with a little bow if you are in Japan. Nor does the exchange endanger privacy. It is peer-to-peer networking: the only person who sees the card is the one who receives it.
Compare it with Microsoft’s deal this week to pay $26.2bn for the professional social network LinkedIn, with its 433m members. That works out at $60 for each LinkedIn user, or $250 for each of its 105m monthly active users - those who not only join but also regularly use the platform. It is a high price for a stack of cards.
Microsoft is, of course, buying more than that. Despite its patchy record of making acquisitions - including of Nokia’s mobile phone division and Skype, the telecoms service - at lofty prices and struggling to achieve promised benefits, Satya Nadella, its chief executive, has not lost his mind.
Apart from data about every member’s career and background, Microsoft gains knowledge of the network of executives and professionals they know - what sociologists would call their “weak ties” and LinkedIn calls “the economic graph”. It amounts to a hoard of data to be mined for advertisers and licensed to marketers so that salespeople can pitch to potential buyers.
This is all pretty valuable in a faintly sinister way: LinkedIn gained $1.9bn of its $3bn revenues last year from “talent solutions”, or what is commonly known as headhunting. Most people like to be offered new jobs while companies like to know where they can recruit, for example, a Mandarin-speaking technology executive in New York with close connections in Beijing.
Mr Nadella and Jeff Weiner, chief executive of LinkedIn, enthused about the deal in a torrent of buzzwords. It united “the world’s leading professional cloud with the world’s leading professional network” and would, in Mr Weiner’s words, offer “more of top-of-the-funnel action ”. Expect to find LinkedIn contacts popping up in Word and Excel, and trawled by Cortana, Microsoft’s artificial intelligence tool.
Microsoft needs something for its $26bn but the deal raises a fundamental question about the internet. How did we leap from business cards, with their privacy safeguards and individual autonomy, to this? Mr Nadella hastened to say nothing will be done without users’ permission but LinkedIn’s habit of constantly emailing perky updates about virtual strangers does not reassure.
As LinkedIn’s user agreement (the legalese to which you consented without reading) puts it, users own their data but they grant “a worldwide, transferable and sublicensable right to use, copy, modify, distribute, publish and process, information and content that you provide . . . without any further consent, notice and/or compensation”.
This is data ownership but not as we knew it. Nor is it the way the internet was meant to work. “The internet was designed to be decentralised so everybody could participate... [Instead] personal data has been locked up in these silos,” Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the computer scientist who invented the world wide web, said last week.
In other words, instead of everyone in effect owning their own business cards and exchanging them, the modern internet economy operates by large companies requiring users to hand over all their virtual cards and blending them on databases. Companies such as LinkedIn and Facebook then make money by targeting advertisements and services, guided by the clouds of data, with users offered benefits in return.
Sir Tim was speaking at a “decentralised web” summit in San Francisco, an event intended to rally software engineers to “tweak internet architecture a little bit” and thus restore its peer-to-peer roots. He wants individuals to hold their data and choose how software interacts with it, not for Microsoft to bundle it all in “the world’s largest professional cloud”.
It is similar to the idea behind the blockchain - that financial and other contracts could be settled across peer-to-peer networks rather than relying on a company or central bank to approve them. As Sir Tim noted, “cyber space” was originally crafted as “one, big hippy encampment” free of traditional laws and commercial contracts, such as long and dense user licences.
Whether Sir Tim can return the internet to its halcyon past is another matter. Hundreds of millions of people like the deal they get from LinkedIn, Facebook and others. They do not have to pay, unless they subscribe to premium benefits, and they obtain free access to some slick, useful applications.
But putting individuals back in charge of their own “economic graph” would not stop them from volunteering data when it suited them. It would be a familiar world in many ways, rather like having a business card.
