David Rosenthal: prediction

Transcript context

…So I think there’s a business line from acquiring the current revenue stream. But in my mind, you don’t buy this product just to cash flow it. They’re not buying that business line because it’s going to pay itself back and short order and we feel good about owning this new revenue stream. It’s an integration play. So I’m calling this a product acquisition since it's a product that they’re going to amplify the current sales of with their own kind of channel and integrations and then make their own products better and kind of define the future of identity. So I would say it’s a product acquisition to be combined with their existing products. I’m going to take a similar route. But I think this is really key. So for me, I say yes, product acquisition. But it's a product acquisition that at least has the potential I think to transform and evolve an entire business line for Microsoft. So clearly this is, I don’t know, but I would imagine this is going to be within Microsoft’s productivity and business processes segment which is one of the new segments that Satya streamlined the company into when he took over. I think there’s so many ways/angles to think about LinkedIn but one of them that you would have to imagine people at Microsoft are thinking about is as a data set and a data acquisition and the ability to continue to operate LinkedIn as the set of products that it is within that segment but then infuse that data into Office, into Active Directory, into Dynamics, into all of the sort of "mobile-first, cloud-first" world that Microsoft lives in now, all of the business tools that they have, you have to imagine it’s something they’re thinking about. Totally. And that’s a really good lead-in. I sort of have like four buckets of why I think they pull the trigger on this one. That first one, you just nailed is integration with Office 365 to extend identity outside the company. In the world of Microsoft viewer, they have Active Directory.…

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