For $19 billion, I can be very Nuanced

You must be a little bit older to remember the war cry of Steve Ballmer of Microsoft, underscoring how important developers were to its success.

Today, you can extend this call to action to the 'healthy developers'. Why? Microsoft just added to its arsenal Nuance. It’s the speech recognition company which, among other things, powers Siri, the voice assistant found in Apple products.

What's so significant about this transaction? (I mean, aside from the $19 billion purchase price.)

It is the Healthcare business or industry, whichever you prefer to call it. This is the next frontier where big tech is moving. Not that technology doesn't play an important role in this already. New means of diagnosis, new treatments and new equipment is added all the time.

However, all of this progress while improving (in theory) the health outcomes of patients also highlights the inefficiencies. Every technological advancement adds another device to manage. There’s more data to analyze and store. And add to this the new normal - personalized medicine and telemedicine, where a doctor communicates with their patient over a video link.

There’s one area in particular where they can improve productivity. That would be allowing doctors to spend as much time with their patients, without doing additional paperwork. Being able to listen to the conversation or allow the doctor simply to dictate the notes to a computer really helps. That's where Nuance comes into play.

Nuance's claim to fame is high quality speech recognition in few verticals with very specialized vocabulary. Try to ask Siri, Google or Cortana what is Schistosomiasis or Lymphangioleiomyomatosis and see if you can a) pronounce it properly b) get the right answer. Your treatment might depend on this.

It’s hard to say how Cortana feels about Nuance, but I am sure that the Nuance technology will become part of the Azure stack. It will be able to better compete with IBM, Amazon or Google.

Aside from Healthcare, Nuance has products for others like Legal, Education and Utilities; and with that, many customers which should eventually migrate to Azure.

My regular readers are now expecting the ending with 'And this is the Recurrent Pattern'. This time, I find that hard to say. After all, Microsoft is famous for very successful acquisitions as well as for complete disasters. I think the outcome of this acquisition will be very nuanced.