Last week, Microsoft completed its acquisition of LinkedIn for $26.2 billion. After winning a purported bidding war with Salesforce.com, Microsoft again battled the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) leader in front of EU regulators. Salesforce argued that the acquisition would make Microsoft too powerful in the CRM market, an argument the regulators rejected. In reality, this battle wasn’t over CRM – at least, not directly. The stakes were much higher than that.