Microsoft Wanted To Buy Pinterest In Bid To Push Its Azure Business

Tech giant Microsoft wanted to buy Pinterest. Pinterest is a photo-sharing and social media platform. It is exclusively designed to save information on the Internet in the form of images, GIFs, and videos. Users can save their data on the platform in the form of pinboards. It is currently valued at USD 51 billion. The software giant’s approach didn’t yield any positive results. The negotiations to takeover Pinterest are inactive. If Microsoft had acquired Pinterest, it would have been the company’s biggest deal so far. The valuation is almost double of its 2016 deal to purchase LinkedIn. Microsoft acquired LinkedIn for USD 26.2 billion. Microsoft held talks with Pinterest and put forth its proposal.

Microsoft wants to push its cloud business. The company’s interest in purchasing Pinterest is an indication of its emerging strategy. Azure is Microsoft’s cloud computing service. The company offers services like servers, databases, networking, storage, and more. It is also trying to push big online services to use Azure. The acquisition of Pinterest is seen as a part of Microsoft’s long strategy to attract more customers. Adding bid names like Pinterest would have helped the company in gaining additional Azure customers. Microsoft earlier approached TikTok. But the company failed to make any headway. A deal to acquire TikTok’s operations in the US would have given Microsoft valuable data. However, Microsoft has purchased some companies that are significant for its growth.

Microsoft launched Azure in 2010. In terms of revenue, it is the largest commercial cloud vendor. But Amazon Web Services is a leader in the sector. It was launched in 2006. Several players in the sector understand the importance of cloud computing. Public cloud services have also grown drastically in the last few years. Big companies and several governments are looking for alternatives to on-premises hosting environments. Both Azure and AWS offer largely the same services. The AWS has over a million customers and two million servers. It is the largest cloud computing platform in the world. It accounts for nearly 40 percent share of the cloud computing business. This share is much more than its competitors.