Did Satya Nadella Think Pinterest Could Drive Azure Adoption?
Reports that Microsoft mulled buying Pinterest for its ability to boost its Azure service. This is curious to me.
As I think about the synergies, mostly I feel like this could be a boost for Microsoft getting scale in an ad-business. MS has never been great in building its own social properties, which need a lot of publishers and ad surface area to have an impact on the market.
Instead, this is about Azure? Pinterest in 2017 signed a $750M deal with AWS for 6 years. That averages to about $10M/month! You thought YOUR cloud bill was high!
If this is true, then we are witnessing Satya Nadella going to "Bill Gates" mode - literally, how do we kneecap the competition? AWS growth rates would surely slow if MS started picking off the top AWS customers. With Pinterest's scale, they are right below players like folks like Twitch and Netflix in Amazon's top list of customers.
Outside of a future ads play, I don't see the synergy for Microsoft in this deal. At least with LinkedIn, you could kind of see the corporate and CRM tie-ins.
