Microsoft Corp.’s latest takeover targets have baffled some analysts and investors who are well aware of the company’s spotty track record in consumer businesses and social media. What’s the appeal, they wonder, in digital properties such as TikTok, Pinterest Inc., or now Discord Inc. The answer in Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella’s mind is clear. “Creation, creation, creation—the next 10 years is going to be as much about creation as it is about consumption and about the community around it, so it’s not creating alone,” Nadella said in an interview last month. “If the last 10 years has been about consumption we’re shopping more, we’re browsing more, we’re binge-watching more there is creation behind every one of those. But I see that phenomenon being much more democratized.”

For Nadella, the next decade of growth in cloud computing and internet use will be defined not by people watching and buying, but by those who are generating and exchanging their own content in different, thriving groups. Though he wasn’t referring specifically to acquisition strategy, his past purchases and current wish list illustrate that Nadella is eager to control some of the means of production.

Seen in the context of Nadella’s philosophy about the next phase of cloud innovation, Microsoft’s talks with Discord and its other recent potential targets don’t seem out of band. Looking back to his first major deals when he took over at the software giant in 2014, there’s a clear through-line from the gaming community-building worlds and servers on Minecraft to the professional social network and corporate think-posts of LinkedIn to the open-source projects hosted and collaborated on software code-sharing platform GitHub. In the interview, Nadella cited GitHub and LinkedIn as prime examples of those content-creation communities he expects to feature more heavily in the future of the cloud.