Microsoft's Acquisition of Nuance Communications: A Second Go at Language Processing

Welcome to the Capital Note, a newsletter about business, finance, and economics. On the menu today: the history of Nuance's Dragon brand, J&J vaccine halted, Jack Ma capitulates, and W. Brian Arthur on "Economics in Nouns and Verbs." To sign up for the Capital Note, follow this link. Dragon 2.0 Yesterday, Microsoft announced a $16 billion acquisition of language-processing firm Nuance Communications, the latest in a string of big-ticket deals closed by CEO Satya Nadella, who spearheaded the purchases of LinkedIn and Github, among others. With the addition of Nuance's cutting-edge language-processing technology (the lion's share of which is in the health-care sector), Microsoft hopes to beef up its enterprise cloud offering.