Strategically the only thing that matters is that TikTok is removed from foreign ownership and that that weak spot in US Internet dominance is removed, so the US can resume global hegemony over platforms (outside of China).
Microsoft generates enough cash every year to safely buy a TikTok annually.
The US Government is probably throwing Microsoft a wink on this one. Despite generating $53 billion pear year in operating income and still having a desktop monopoly, Microsoft was excluded from the recent government grilling.
Maybe Microsoft will get a nice Azure contract in return.
In a year or a few, Microsoft IPOs TikTok or works with private equity to shift its ownership and then Microsoft washes their hands of it, taking a small bath in the process (if they can pull an IPO fast enough, given this market, maybe even making some money on the deal). Sometimes you gotta do a favor for Uncle Sam.
How does an international app separate its operations enough to have a full distinct US operation? Will they be able to see post from someone in Canada? in China? Will China be able to see post from US users?
Seems like something that needs to be all or nothing.
You make another Douyin, but for the US only, call it Musicaly, with US data sovereignty and censorship. Creators from outside the US can make an account on it and reach American audiences. But Americans can no longer use the international version of Tiktok.
When a disciplined company like Microsoft buys a creative company like tiktok, the best Microsoft can do is monetize it. They will establish content providers. Create distributors. Add a healthy ad network.
But most undoubtedly, the creativity and innovation that tiktok can further yield will disappear. And this will lay the next foundation for another company to take over.
I’m sure people have better takes on it than I do... seems to me like data mining service became more popular than anyone would have ever guessed but..
Damn BusinessInsider... showing me a popup over the article on mobile saying:
> Sorry for the wait.
We’re experiencing tremendous demand right now. The page will reload in 30 seconds and you will then get a chance to buy your access.
... after the article was already fully loaded. That’s some serious anti-consumer dark pattern bullshit.
> Gasparino also reported the White House is "deeply concerned" about Microsoft's potential purchase and whether any Chinese investors would retain a stake in TikTok's US operations, citing unnamed sources.
And there's the lede. Consider this "story in two headlines" from an earlier high-profile Microsoft acquisition:
That's what concerns me. Will that acquisition make MS an appendage of the Chinese government? Will that create conflicts of interest with serving the NSA?
Isn't it just as likely that this is a backhand deal by the NSA to limit Chinese easedropping? I can't really image any other reason for Microsoft at the hight of it's profitability to want to enter such a competative and fickle social media market.
If the warez community, you'd actually be surprised to find that most of Microsoft internal leaks and hacks come from Russia. Russian groups like WZorNET produce unreleased internal builds of Microsoft solutions all the time.
Snowden's leaks showed the government could wiretap Skype calls since at least 2010, when the FBI's Skype wiretaps started being ingested into PRISM. Your conspiracy theory for why Microsoft would buy Skype in 2011 doesn't survive even the most rudimentary investigation.
> This seems like a dumb move, why would MS want to get tied up in the horrors of social media when they have such a profitable empire.
Because it's a business operating after Wall Street decided that perpetual growth was not only a realistic expectation for stocks, but a mandatory one as well.
> This seems like a dumb move, why would MS want to get tied up in the horrors of social media when they have such a profitable empire.
First idea: Facebook's earnings over the past few years.
If this is true, it makes sense not from what MS is today but what they want to become.
Remember the I'm a Mac I'm a PC ads? MS was branded as uncool, boring and not creative and that mindset probably influenced a lot of Apple's adoption in the mobile space.
Microsoft wants to go where the money is and get the mindshare of younger generations who will have money to spend a few years down the line.
If they can have TikTok run on Azure, it'll improve Azure by leaps and bounds similar to Netflix running on AWS. I think it's a brilliant move to buy TikTok. I don't see what else they could potentially buy right now.
>This seems like a dumb move, why would MS want to get tied up in the horrors of social media when they have such a profitable empire.
They bought LinkedIn, which increasingly resembles a niche social media for professionals, all the way down to a news feed that is increasingly filled with motivational junk
Then there's Github, which used to advertise itself as "social coding".
Microsoft has done plenty already to get their foot in the door of social media.
If you squint, you can see the Minecraft fit: along with the Xbox side, it's quasi "coding" or "developing" for kids. Basically, you hook the kids who are interested in developing super, duper early.
To phase out TikTok usernames/handles and force users to move to Live/Outlook emails e.g tiktok-user@outlook.com. Then sit back and gleefully marvel at their own accomplishment.
But why? It doesn't fit into anything. Sure Microsoft has previously bought weird things, but lately they've been pretty focused. Why would they buy TikTok+
The allure of a highly used social product seems to always tempt FAANG companies. The same reason Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook would want this is why Microsoft wants it too.
Perhaps you could evolve another mobile OS out of TikTok that is not Android or iOS. MicroSoft failed to get traction with its two previous mobile OSes (perhaps because they were basically offering reworked Windows).
I never really understood the panic over TikTok. Is the fear about security, or is the fear that China might actually have successful social media product in the US?
The fear is that any large Chinese project holding the personal data of Americans is inherently a security concern. It wouldn't be a big issue if Tiktok were French or Korean or something.
This is exactly it. There's widespread fear that China is buying its way into the personal data of billions through its state-sponsored businesses like Huawei and ByteDance.
It's not that ByteDance, owners of TikTok, are especially state-sponsored (though given the treasure trove of user data they're sitting on, especial isn't a stretch of the imagination): all Chinese corporations are either actively overseen by a CCP committee or potentials to be.
Even if TikTok was openly promoting socialism - so what? The constitution doesn't split hairs about free speech. We're free to use speech to promote the political philosophy of our choosing in this country. The antidote to 'bad' speech, as per the constitution, is more speech, not to outlaw the speech you don't like.
There's nothing wrong with speech we don't like, unless (as in this case) it's made at the direction of a foreign government. There's long-standing precedent for preventing that kind of thing.
> There's nothing wrong with speech we don't like, unless (as in this case) it's made at the direction of a foreign government.
I mean, we don't ban China Daily. Also, and I'm going to have to check with someone who uses TikTok, but I don't think the Chinese government is giving orders to TikTok users about what to songs they're supposed to dance to on any given day.
> Also, and I'm going to have to check with someone who uses TikTok, but I don't think the Chinese government is giving orders to TikTok users about what to songs they're supposed to dance to on any given day.
They could, though. China is welcome to repeal those laws if they don't want the rest of the world to assume that they use them...
It's a huge relief that ByteDance is not the government of China. What level of foreign ownership makes a company purely foreign controlled? If funds controlled by Chinese nationals bought stakes in Facebook/Twitter/Alphabet, wouldn't that put them in the same category? What portion of ByteDance would have to be owned by non-Chinese people before it would be in the clear?
The premise of why a Chinese company(ies) should be singled out in this way is that China is a totalitarian state where people and corporations are subject to the absolute will of the Communist Party so "ByteDance is not the government of China" isn't going to convince anyone who believes this action is justified.
If Facebook/Twitter/Alphabet were to be acquired by Chinese interests that would almost certainly be blocked by CFIUS just like the potential Broadcom/Qualcomm acquisition was a couple years ago.
Should the US also ban foreign TV shows, music, books originated from totalitarian states? Because the producers are subject to the will of their governments and might be compelled into spreading propaganda although it has not happen?
I personally believe that freedom will prevail and this kind of race to the bottom towards censorship and executive branch unilateralism is sad.
I think there is also the impression that, even if china has not already been leaning on TikTok, if they ever did TikTok would necessarily relent. Whereas in the US we have examples of companies (e.g. apple) denying requests from the Feds.
Now I'm not saying this is necessarily true, but I think that is where the concern is coming from.
Speaking personally, here's why TikTok concerns me: TikTok is a Chinese business, and China has shown no limit to how much it will meddle in the affairs of and even take control of Chinese businesses for the furthering of the Chinese state's agenda.
Simultaneously, TikTok has captured the daily attention spans of millions of Americans, many of them especially young and impressionable. They've captured their attention in the form of a black box algorithm that promotes content in whichever way TikTok deems most appropriate.
These two facts mean that the Chinese government now has direct access to the brains of millions of young Americans, with zero oversight. Imagine China subtly promoting videos to create outrage and civil unrest in the US, or to feed anti-US propaganda to germinate terrorist groups in the US. These might sound like far flung possibilities, but I think it's hard to say what a country that views the US as its enemy (politically, economically, philosophically) might do with that kind of power, and I don't think we can wait to find out.
Does China really identify as "a country that views the US as its enemy (politically, economically, philosophically)" or is that just a projection of how the US feels about China?
Absolutely. China does not recognize even the idea of Human Rights, let alone their implementation. What do you think the Great Chinese Firewall is for? Shutting out all those ideas from the rest of the world that are deemed hostile to the ruling party's ideology.
America is a fundamentally revolutionary nation fighting for global democracy. We have learned not to force it on countries anymore with violence, but the struggle for global democracy remains nonetheless.
> America is a fundamentally revolutionary nation fighting for global democracy.
I've studied the history of the US enough to know that this is brazen propaganda with no firm basis in reality. The US has no problem propping up brutal tyrants when it's convenient.
Correct, the US doesn't only support totalitarians. However, it does support them. The US support for democracy isn't based on principles is my point, it's based on convenience, and the US will merrily crush a democracy and install a dictator if it's in US interests.
Ah, this is your mistake. The US support for democracy is absolutely based on principles. It is the exceptions that you're focusing on and trying to use to create some essentialist caricature of the US.
Keep in mind that most examples of the US supporting non democratic regimes come from the Cold War, when the thinking was that Communism posed an existential threat to global freedom and democracy and that in the interest of democracy's general preservation and overall victory over tyrannical communism, it was necessary to prop up dictators who would act harshly against the Communist threat.
Was this the right move in hindsight? Maybe not. But it was absolutely borne from a desire to preserve global freedom from tyrannical communism.
> Ah, this is your mistake. The US support for democracy is absolutely based on principles. It is the exceptions that you're focusing on and trying to use to create some essentialist caricature of the US.
I honestly don't have to try to make the US into some caricature. The US isn't good or evil, it's a self-interested nation like any other nation and it practices realpolitik like any other nation. I'm simply not putting it on a pedestal and pretending that the actions of the country are anything other than pure self-interest.
There have also been reports that the Chinese use all the behavioral data reaped from TikTok as input for training their own surveillance and censorship ML. The international user base is involuntarily turned into fuel for the totalitarian Chinese oppression machinery.
"Imagine China subtly promoting videos to create outrage and civil unrest in the US, or to feed anti-US propaganda to germinate terrorist groups in the US."
our president is doing a fine job of that now with his twitter account.
Right, but we have the ability to vote him out of office. We don't have the same oversight of the content the Chinese Communist Party wants to put in the minds of young Americans, besides banning the app.
Or, you know, our mainstream media exclusively broadcasting videos without contextualization of white police officers killing black men to the country and ignoring all other racial configurations of violence in order to stoke racial tension.
> These two facts mean that the Chinese government now has direct access to the brains of millions of young Americans, with zero oversight. Imagine China subtly promoting videos to create outrage and civil unrest in the US, or to feed anti-US propaganda to germinate terrorist groups in the US. These might sound like far flung possibilities, but I think it's hard to say what a country that views the US as its enemy (politically, economically, philosophically) might do with that kind of power, and I don't think we can wait to find out.
Ironically this idea is one of the rationale behind the GFW. Dont want any Spring/colour revolution over there.
> They've captured their attention in the form of a black box algorithm that promotes content in whichever way TikTok deems most appropriate.
Ugh no. TikTok's recommendation algorithm works the way it does because of its userbase's preference. TikTok is NOT free to change it willy-nilly. At best TikTok can "steer" the algorithm.
> Imagine China subtly promoting videos to create outrage and civil unrest in the US, or to feed anti-US propaganda to germinate terrorist groups in the US.
I mean, Youtube[1] and Facebook[2] already do this, and nobody has a problem with it. Do foreign-owned businesses not have first amendment rights?
I should also point out that honest journalistic reporting of the reality in the US is more than sufficient to create outrage and civil unrest in the US.
> Imagine China subtly promoting videos to create outrage and civil unrest in the US, or to feed anti-US propaganda to germinate terrorist groups in the US.
Restricting foreign media based on "propaganda" fears is not a behavior that free societies engage in.
TikTok has been caught violating COPPA. One of my kids recently signed up for TikTok without any age verification using their Android Google account, which then shares their email address with TikTok which is clear violation of COPPA. Nothing is being done to prevent this. TikTok actively caters to underage youth and most of the community is about producing provocative dance videos. In the end, TikTok is full of underage kids being provocative and is a cesspool and playground for pedophiles.
What happens when Google is left out of having a social media business when most of the things are happening in the social media these days? They tried few times and looks like gave up.
They still have youtube which is in a league of its own and while it may not be consiered a "social network" it's still definitely social media, arguably more than even TikTok could be considered as.
This is far better than having facial recognition data in the hands of CCP. I am not a fan of US gov, but if I had the choice, I wouldn't side with CCP. The genie is already out and we've failed to put laws in place to stop all this data collection way back in 2004. Surprisingly, I feel comfortable with Microsoft having this data. What a world we've created.
Anyone who wants TikTok's facial recognition data can just scrape their videos and process them with their own models. If ByteDance can afford the storage and bandwidth, so can any interested surveillance agency.
Not good for Microsoft is more like it; reminds me of the attempted Yahoo acquisition.
Microsoft is a platform company; they do not "get" social media or user engagement (e.g. MSN, which has sputtered on feebly for years) so they'll wind up tanking TikTok for sure.
It's moderately humorous that we have congressional antitrust hearings going on against Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google.
Meanwhile the largest company in the world by Q1 2020 market cap, a company that was found to be in violation of the antitrust act in the past, a company which now owns the most popular social network for business is about to acquire a significant part of the fastest growing social media platform.
But that's the exact issue, it's political poison because of who owns it. Why would it be "magically transmuted away"? That's literally the entire point.
My point is that it's funny that what makes TikTok poisonous is not the incredibly intrusive surveillance itself, but rather the fact that it's being done by a foreign company/government (which ultimately can probably do a lot less harm to Americans with all that info than Microsoft or the US government).
How would that even function in practice? I am honestly baffled at this. If Trump is so eager to hinder TikTok (China's influence), then he should just ban the company like he did with Huawei and be done with it. The instant he does it, TikTok is doomed (internationally), they are a pure digital product.
I use TikTok a lot (there are >1M combined views on my videos) and I've never heard of it. A lot of good TikTokers from before the app really took off went to Byte (made by the dudes that made Vine) and it seems like Byte is the logical successor.
I expect most users will migrate eventually. TikTok had its charms because it was completely mismanaged. The discover feed had a mix between popular (>1M likes) and very unpopular (1-30 likes) videos and very odd videos, like someone slowly crushing a hornet to death inside a syringe, get popular often. Microsoft tends to have a "digital gentrification" effect on the services they take over; for example, when they bought Minecraft, they stopped adding `- removed Herobrine` to update logs. To a lot of fans it showed a lack of respect to the game and its culture. Many older players even refuse to play any Microsoft-created Minecraft versions because they changed a lot of core gameplay mechanics.
This same effect will probably hit their acquisition of TikTok. They'll make it so pro-equality posts make it to the feed more often (TikTok has a semi-4chan-ish culture around its humor rather than an "accepting" environment, though a minority of users are actually bigoted), polish the horrid UX, make good video effects rather than the very odd choices available now, and I expect they'll make it so videos can be longer (the default length is 15 seconds but you can make videos up to 60). This would ruin TikTok. The limitations imposed by TikTok's designers are crucial for fostering creativity (in my opinion, but I've made literally hundreds of videos on the platform). Without them, TikTok is just another video app.
One more thing- most TikTok users despise America. America, to the youth, is a rich bastard bully of a country with military bases across the world despite no other country having bases in America. They believe being spied on by China is preferable to being spied on by America; if you're spied on by China, what are they gonna do, try to send you propaganda? If you're spied on by America and they don't like you, they just send cops in plainclothes to your house to shoot you, and the cops don't even get charged. Even if Microsoft doesn't hurt TikTok, TikTok's further association with America alone will be enough to make users move.
> TikTok had its charms because it was completely mismanaged. The discover feed had a mix between popular (>1M likes) and very unpopular (1-30 likes) videos and very odd videos, like someone slowly crushing a hornet to death inside a syringe, get popular often.
Why is that a mismanagement? You said it yourself, it has its charms. (And I agree with you.) What is the goal of discover feed if not to have "its charms"? To the contrary, I think TikTok's discover feed is genius. It is very well managed, and I hope it doesn't change.
That was a bad example. A better one is that TikTok has no consistent guidelines on what videos are allowed on their platform. A video I made with "\actually buys heroin like a boss\" was allowed to stay up on the platform, but then another one with the same text was `Removed for violating Community Guidelines`. Someone I knew had their account taken down for pretending to, well, hump an anime body pillow, and yet they'd been featured in TikTok advertisements months before.
I think as long as the product management still retains Bytedance's DNA (and Douyin), it has a good prospect to survive and thrive.
That's why I really hope that somehow they can have or keep in contact with Douyin product management folks.
Microsoft is definitely a good candidate here for TikTok. With them missing Mobile-rise and Social media-rise, this acquisition seems to be a desperate attempt to cement their position in a hyper growth consumer product that's both Mobile and Social Media. Question is, Would it impact Microsoft's image? I mean, Tik Tok is known for their addictive design and Privacy controversy, so not sure how it goes well with the recent Good-guy image Microsoft's trying to portray itself.
It would help address the spyware concern by moving it to a US company, and give them a better foothold in Social Networking than Linked-in provides.
I'd have a few concerns about if MS can keep it growing-
For one, I worry that Microsoft may mismanage it, similar to how they treated Skype.
We saw Yahoo buy many reasonable smaller social networks (Flickr, Delicious, Tumblr) and was never able to make it work.
Microsoft has seemed to get better at acquisions lately though, so they may be able to pull it off.
The other concern is that youth-based social networks tend to have a short half-life; Snap isn't exactly taking over the world anymore.
But personally, I absolutely think it'd be worth the gamble.
The price is relatively low (just over 1 quarter of revenue), and if they can keep it going it's a good hedge against FB, if nothing else.
Fair enough, I suppose it depends on how broad your categories are.
Personally, I absolutely consider YouTube a video-based social network.
You follow people/brands, have at timeline, can contribute comments on what they post, etc.
It doesn't tend to have as broad a social graph as something like FB, but almost nothing does.
Twitter (for example) also has a large number of popular public accounts, similar to YouTube.
Facebook and Twitter mostly do not subsidize content creation, but YouTube and TikTok definitely do. That's why I think TikTok will have more staying power.
Github seems to have gotten some fire in their ass in the last 1-2 years. Hard to say whether that is because of Microsoft or competition of Gitlab, or both.
All of the founders except one were already gone, and the remaining one left immediately after the acquisition closed. It wasn't about executing a vision, it was about cashing out.
I comparison shopped Gitlab vs Github a few years back, and it was a joke: Gitlab killed Github on features and price. They still do. I'm not overly attached to either platform, but clearly Github has ridden on their laurels hard for a long time and Gitlab has not.
If Github were a startup trying to get a solid MVP together, sure. However, Github was charging premium prices for an enterprise-grade product, but they were missing a super basic enterprise feature: they weren't able to connect LDAP groups to Github groups.
Github is actively merging features of Azure DevOps and they plan to merge the two eventually, also business model changes, integration with VS Code, Azure, etc.
Github is actively within Microsoft ecosystem and all for the better of both sides from my experience.
Xamarin was crap before the Microsoft acquisition, it was improving at great pace afterwards and it's pretty integrated into .NET standard story (but still crap last time I used it 3 years ago) - I don't even see how you could say anything like they left them alone, feels more like they got rolled up in to .NET devision, again for the better of both (Mono was still the only solution for some scenarios until very recently even outside of mobile)
Well, Skype the brand was botched, but Skype is basically what powers Microsoft Teams now. Which is widely successful due to it being bundled with Microsoft 365 (also Teams is pretty decent compared to the comp).
Though they are separate products with different UIs and features, Teams, Skype consumer version, and (maybe?) Microsoft-hosted Skype for Business all run on the same communications tech stack, made by Microsoft's Intelligent Conversation and Communications Cloud division.*
Interestingly, it looks like Teams was at one point code-named "Skype Spaces" - a name which occasionally appears in Teams deep link URLs.
Yeah, if you look at the network requests Teams makes, many of them include 'skype' in the name. Only thing I went off to guess it is a lot of the same services.
The 'skype' name in the network requests is more a remnant of a last minute change from the internal product name (Skype Teams) than a statement of the technologies underpinning the product.
The Teams comms/meeting stack was its own thing - an evolution (or frankenstein's monster mix) of Skype for Business and Skype Consumer technologies. That is one of the reasons why Teams did not have interop capabilities with SfB at launch.
Side note: The Skype for Business communications stack is a descendent of Lync/Office Communicator was completely separate from Skype Consumer (only thing it shared was branding).
that would explain why skype was horrible in mobile. notification arrived late, messages coming late. thanks god Microsoft Teams is different. I hope Microsoft Teams doing its job better on mobile.
Not sure on the underlying technology, but I would bet that the Skype brand definitely helped Lync adoption (Skype for Business), and the pervasiveness of Skype for Business was key to Teams success.
What does Tiktok have to do with linkedin? As far as I am concerned its a high write-off. It may be is worth a billion or two as a private company. It doesn't provide any value.
> It would help address the spyware concern by moving it to a US company
Does anyone else remember when housing data in US severs was considered less private than alternatives? It’s incredible that Azure, and the rest of the us based cloud providers, have been able to rebrand American severs as the cloud so successfully that they are well known for being secure and safe.
I don't think anyone with knowledge has ever seriously conisdered servers in China more private than US servers. Unless your goal was to keep information private only from the US government.
I'm not sure it would, unless the app development were to be significantly different. People sometimes underestimate the cultural differences.
The example I like to give is the one given by John Hooker, who taught comparative culture at CMU. As it is, U.S. jokes are often not funny to many continental Europeans. Chinese humor is of a whole other bent.
Another interesting comparison point are Japanese websites, which are borderline unnavigable (to me) because they avoid any use of larger fonts.
> Does anyone else remember when housing data in US severs was considered less private than alternatives?
Right now much of Europe considers storing data in the US to be less private than hosting it locally. The US is certainly not in the same category as Russia or China, but it's not great either.
That’s probably true for the general population, but not so much for our privacy legislation. Certain categories of data, for some provincial governments, absolutely must reside in Canada and can’t be hosted in the US. Among the various reasons is the Patriot Act. Canadian laws specify certain circumstances in which a data breach must be disclosed to the user, and the Patriot Act (via NSLs) can mandate that the breach not be disclosed to the user. Canadian companies hosting their data in the US cannot simultaneously comply with the law in both countries.
Every major cloud vendor has zones outside the US. Just because you’re hosted on Azure doesn’t mean you’re hosted in the US or that US law applies to you.
My understanding of the 2018 CLOUD act is that a US headquartered cloud vendor must hand over subpoenaed customer data even if the datacentre is outside the USA.
Do we have any evidence that a company has been forced into a situation like this yet? Where they've been required by the US to turn over data but prevented by the GDPR? I feel like that would've been big news, but surely it's happened already.
The joy of NSLs is that you’re not allowed to talk about them. I have no idea what it would look like, but I imagine there would be nervous lawyers talking to both the US DoJ and their local privacy commissioner, quietly trying to find some solution that doesn’t involve the executives going to jail when setting foot in the US.
This is totally irrelevant to the discussion but I found it amusing that the author of that articles name is Jim Halpert and actually very mildly looks like Jim Halpert
This is the rationale between sovereign clouds like Azure Germany, I think. In that case Microsoft provides the software and design, but the whole cloud is operated by EU citizens and no Americans have direct access. The idea being that Microsoft couldn't be compelled to hand over data because it has no access. I'm sure AWS (and maybe GCP) have such things by now.
Disclaimer: I work in Azure but not on this, so my info may be wrong.
Outlook is one of the few services approved in China (I have a western friend that lives there and is constantly fighting with VPNs/trying to use the services he wants).
Outlook pesters you for a Chinese phone number (internet phone doesn't work), probably so it's easier for the users to be tracked.
I assume they've made whatever CCP requirements are necessary in order to operate there.
That said, they'd at least protect western accounts in the US if they bought TikTok.
Like Github and LinkedIn, I think this would be a smart move. Microsoft has also been a lot better stewards of these companies than they were back in the days of the Skype acquisition (2011, Steve Ballmer time). It's still amazing the turn around they've had after Ballmer left, people underestimate the effect of bad leadership at the top.
>It would help address the spyware concern by moving it to a US company
it might help for some people
Personally, i'm a little bit concerned that microsoft just received a $10bn DOD contract, and now the US government is essentially forcing a sale of TikTok to Microsoft. I'm not convinced that the company running the hot new social network (as well as all our source code) owing a bunch of favours to the US govermnent is really any better than it being subject to the Chinese government.
you're right. for me personally, i think it's much worse.
the odds that chinese goverment data collection ever affects me is minimal. as a canadian citizen who sometimes visits the US and routinely uses services provided by american companies, the odds that US government data collection affects me in some way is pretty high.
IMHO anything with more than 400 million users is very hard to fuck up as a platform. You can fuck up the product in many ways but you will preserve the strong network effects.
Yahoo was also an incompetent operator with almost no solid business criteria or long term strategy. For 15 years or more Yahoo was simply a wannabe Google and never managed to find their business character.
I mean, it’s almost criminal to compare the performance of Microsoft vs Yahoo as operators. They are in different leagues.
I thought we trusted the government to be a good steward over tech? Wasn’t that the entire purpose of the dog and pony show with tech CEOs earlier this week?
It's better as in the US government isn't a model citizen but it's also not disappearing citizens, enslaving ethnic groups, selling organs from political prisoners, or trying to take over the South China Sea.
A clever play? Do Americans know a world outside of the US market exist?
What hell of a message is this?
A publicly traded company buying the domestic operations of a foreign company, just because the government deems it a National security risk, with no proof whatsoever? The same government who has spied citizen and high officials of ALLIED countries for years?
Is all this completely lost on all of corporate America?
This is pure international trade insanity.
We’re discussing Microsoft buying TikTok as if it were just another valid course of action, while it’s the most Soviet-Russia style thing that has ever happened in International tech trade in decades.
You want another one? Taiwan’s TSMC and all the shenanigans going on about their Arizona fab plant.
Pure. insanity.
If you don’t get it, pause for a moment, and think what would happen if China would suggest that Huawei should buy a successful Western service operating in China to avoid a national security risk.
Pompeo is right when he says that this is like another Cold War, but with just one big difference: it’s America that’s playing the role of Russia now.
I thought it was crazy at first too, but they aren't forcing them to sell it. They have the option to sell it or have it banned. Look how many American apps are banned in China.
Gasparino puts forth a lot of very dodgy or outright false "SCOOPS" (as he calls them on his Twitter account). They're always couched in terms like "according to my sources" or "this is what I'm hearing" so that he has plausible deniability if they don't come to pass.
You can even see it in the headline to this story: "Sources speculate one name to buy TikTok is Microsoft"
Does Trump have the power to just order a company to be broken up like this?
I get that there’s a national security angle to this, but I imagine there would be outrage if he unilaterally decided to break up Facebook, for example.
Trump is not acting totally unilaterally here. The intelligence community is critical of TikTok as well as multiple republican senators.
In fact, it's even possible that the government is involved in this purchase in some form, by either using their good standing as big MS customers (how many federal employees run Windows+Ms Office computers?), or by offering money directly, something that is purported to have happened when Microsoft purchased Skype a few years ago. Getting rid of E2EE for Skype, which Microsoft eventually did, was a big request of the US intelligence community.
Ultimately it'd be a good resolution to the issue. No more spying by China and American teenagers can safely continue using the app.
I don't think they'd be well served to, in the same way that the main Facebook app isn't merged with Instagram (although they can share some logins/etc).
They're targetting different demographics, and are used very differently (Job searching vs short-form videos).
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 319 ms ] threadThe kids will always move on to something else.
http://whoownsfacebook.com/#Microsoft
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GitHub#ICE_Contract
Strategically the only thing that matters is that TikTok is removed from foreign ownership and that that weak spot in US Internet dominance is removed, so the US can resume global hegemony over platforms (outside of China).
Microsoft generates enough cash every year to safely buy a TikTok annually.
The US Government is probably throwing Microsoft a wink on this one. Despite generating $53 billion pear year in operating income and still having a desktop monopoly, Microsoft was excluded from the recent government grilling.
Maybe Microsoft will get a nice Azure contract in return.
In a year or a few, Microsoft IPOs TikTok or works with private equity to shift its ownership and then Microsoft washes their hands of it, taking a small bath in the process (if they can pull an IPO fast enough, given this market, maybe even making some money on the deal). Sometimes you gotta do a favor for Uncle Sam.
This has happened previously in history (mainframe -> PC, back to Cloud Computing, and now to edge/IoT).
If you want to "skate where the puck is going" you would be paying attention to the open web standards space.
But most undoubtedly, the creativity and innovation that tiktok can further yield will disappear. And this will lay the next foundation for another company to take over.
Damn BusinessInsider... showing me a popup over the article on mobile saying:
> Sorry for the wait. We’re experiencing tremendous demand right now. The page will reload in 30 seconds and you will then get a chance to buy your access.
... after the article was already fully loaded. That’s some serious anti-consumer dark pattern bullshit.
And there's the lede. Consider this "story in two headlines" from an earlier high-profile Microsoft acquisition:
"NSA offering 'billions' for Skype eavesdrop solution" https://www.theregister.com/2009/02/12/nsa_offers_billions_f...
"Microsoft Buys Skype for $8.5 Billion. Why, Exactly?" https://www.wired.com/2011/05/microsoft-buys-skype-2/
This seems like a dumb move, why would MS want to get tied up in the horrors of social media when they have such a profitable empire.
They couldn’t possibly tie in MicMok to Office 365 and have anything good come from it.
Microsoft Re-Designs the iPod Packaging https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUXnJraKM3k
They just sold their Mixer platform to Facebook.
If they can't manage correctly a game streaming platform, I don't see them be able to take on a video social network one.
Because it's a business operating after Wall Street decided that perpetual growth was not only a realistic expectation for stocks, but a mandatory one as well.
Made my day ... thank you
First idea: Facebook's earnings over the past few years.
If this is true, it makes sense not from what MS is today but what they want to become.
Remember the I'm a Mac I'm a PC ads? MS was branded as uncool, boring and not creative and that mindset probably influenced a lot of Apple's adoption in the mobile space.
Microsoft wants to go where the money is and get the mindshare of younger generations who will have money to spend a few years down the line.
They bought LinkedIn, which increasingly resembles a niche social media for professionals, all the way down to a news feed that is increasingly filled with motivational junk
Then there's Github, which used to advertise itself as "social coding".
Microsoft has done plenty already to get their foot in the door of social media.
TikTok presumably hits a broad audience that Office / Outlook / Teams do not.
See https://thediplomat.com/2019/12/politics-in-the-boardroom-th...
I mean, we don't ban China Daily. Also, and I'm going to have to check with someone who uses TikTok, but I don't think the Chinese government is giving orders to TikTok users about what to songs they're supposed to dance to on any given day.
They could, though. China is welcome to repeal those laws if they don't want the rest of the world to assume that they use them...
If Facebook/Twitter/Alphabet were to be acquired by Chinese interests that would almost certainly be blocked by CFIUS just like the potential Broadcom/Qualcomm acquisition was a couple years ago.
I personally believe that freedom will prevail and this kind of race to the bottom towards censorship and executive branch unilateralism is sad.
Whatever level allows them to dictate behavior.
> If funds controlled by Chinese nationals bought stakes in Facebook/Twitter/Alphabet, wouldn't that put them in the same category?
Of course.
> What portion of ByteDance would have to be owned by non-Chinese people before it would be in the clear?
Of far more significant is whether ByteDance's leadership are subject to Chinese jurisdiction.
Now I'm not saying this is necessarily true, but I think that is where the concern is coming from.
Simultaneously, TikTok has captured the daily attention spans of millions of Americans, many of them especially young and impressionable. They've captured their attention in the form of a black box algorithm that promotes content in whichever way TikTok deems most appropriate.
These two facts mean that the Chinese government now has direct access to the brains of millions of young Americans, with zero oversight. Imagine China subtly promoting videos to create outrage and civil unrest in the US, or to feed anti-US propaganda to germinate terrorist groups in the US. These might sound like far flung possibilities, but I think it's hard to say what a country that views the US as its enemy (politically, economically, philosophically) might do with that kind of power, and I don't think we can wait to find out.
We are an existential threat to China.
I've studied the history of the US enough to know that this is brazen propaganda with no firm basis in reality. The US has no problem propping up brutal tyrants when it's convenient.
Keep in mind that most examples of the US supporting non democratic regimes come from the Cold War, when the thinking was that Communism posed an existential threat to global freedom and democracy and that in the interest of democracy's general preservation and overall victory over tyrannical communism, it was necessary to prop up dictators who would act harshly against the Communist threat.
Was this the right move in hindsight? Maybe not. But it was absolutely borne from a desire to preserve global freedom from tyrannical communism.
I honestly don't have to try to make the US into some caricature. The US isn't good or evil, it's a self-interested nation like any other nation and it practices realpolitik like any other nation. I'm simply not putting it on a pedestal and pretending that the actions of the country are anything other than pure self-interest.
our president is doing a fine job of that now with his twitter account.
Ironically this idea is one of the rationale behind the GFW. Dont want any Spring/colour revolution over there.
Ugh no. TikTok's recommendation algorithm works the way it does because of its userbase's preference. TikTok is NOT free to change it willy-nilly. At best TikTok can "steer" the algorithm.
I mean, Youtube[1] and Facebook[2] already do this, and nobody has a problem with it. Do foreign-owned businesses not have first amendment rights?
I should also point out that honest journalistic reporting of the reality in the US is more than sufficient to create outrage and civil unrest in the US.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/28/study-of-youtube-comments-...
[2] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanhatesthis/the-far-r...
Restricting foreign media based on "propaganda" fears is not a behavior that free societies engage in.
Edit: acquired
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musically
Facebook or Google would be worse, but Microsoft is only marginally less bad here.
For those who are skeptical, just watch the Vice doc on how China tracks people, it's on a whole another level: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLo3e1Pak-Y
I'm a huge fan of competition and the free market. Consolidating social media platforms under ever-larger corporate banners is just bad.
Microsoft is a platform company; they do not "get" social media or user engagement (e.g. MSN, which has sputtered on feebly for years) so they'll wind up tanking TikTok for sure.
Meanwhile the largest company in the world by Q1 2020 market cap, a company that was found to be in violation of the antitrust act in the past, a company which now owns the most popular social network for business is about to acquire a significant part of the fastest growing social media platform.
I think it's a bad idea because I think TicTok is only a year or two away from their peak until another app catches the zeitgeist.
What happens if MSFT buy TikTok only for the users to migrate to the new flavour of the social media app.
I expect most users will migrate eventually. TikTok had its charms because it was completely mismanaged. The discover feed had a mix between popular (>1M likes) and very unpopular (1-30 likes) videos and very odd videos, like someone slowly crushing a hornet to death inside a syringe, get popular often. Microsoft tends to have a "digital gentrification" effect on the services they take over; for example, when they bought Minecraft, they stopped adding `- removed Herobrine` to update logs. To a lot of fans it showed a lack of respect to the game and its culture. Many older players even refuse to play any Microsoft-created Minecraft versions because they changed a lot of core gameplay mechanics.
This same effect will probably hit their acquisition of TikTok. They'll make it so pro-equality posts make it to the feed more often (TikTok has a semi-4chan-ish culture around its humor rather than an "accepting" environment, though a minority of users are actually bigoted), polish the horrid UX, make good video effects rather than the very odd choices available now, and I expect they'll make it so videos can be longer (the default length is 15 seconds but you can make videos up to 60). This would ruin TikTok. The limitations imposed by TikTok's designers are crucial for fostering creativity (in my opinion, but I've made literally hundreds of videos on the platform). Without them, TikTok is just another video app.
One more thing- most TikTok users despise America. America, to the youth, is a rich bastard bully of a country with military bases across the world despite no other country having bases in America. They believe being spied on by China is preferable to being spied on by America; if you're spied on by China, what are they gonna do, try to send you propaganda? If you're spied on by America and they don't like you, they just send cops in plainclothes to your house to shoot you, and the cops don't even get charged. Even if Microsoft doesn't hurt TikTok, TikTok's further association with America alone will be enough to make users move.
Why is that a mismanagement? You said it yourself, it has its charms. (And I agree with you.) What is the goal of discover feed if not to have "its charms"? To the contrary, I think TikTok's discover feed is genius. It is very well managed, and I hope it doesn't change.
It would help address the spyware concern by moving it to a US company, and give them a better foothold in Social Networking than Linked-in provides.
I'd have a few concerns about if MS can keep it growing-
For one, I worry that Microsoft may mismanage it, similar to how they treated Skype. We saw Yahoo buy many reasonable smaller social networks (Flickr, Delicious, Tumblr) and was never able to make it work. Microsoft has seemed to get better at acquisions lately though, so they may be able to pull it off.
The other concern is that youth-based social networks tend to have a short half-life; Snap isn't exactly taking over the world anymore.
But personally, I absolutely think it'd be worth the gamble. The price is relatively low (just over 1 quarter of revenue), and if they can keep it going it's a good hedge against FB, if nothing else.
> 41 percent of TikTok users are aged between 16 and 24.
That seems rather youth-heavy when compared to Facebook (Timeline), Twitter, YouTube, Instagram.
Nothing inherently wrong with that, but it does come with risks.
Personally, I absolutely consider YouTube a video-based social network. You follow people/brands, have at timeline, can contribute comments on what they post, etc.
It doesn't tend to have as broad a social graph as something like FB, but almost nothing does. Twitter (for example) also has a large number of popular public accounts, similar to YouTube.
Github is actively within Microsoft ecosystem and all for the better of both sides from my experience.
Xamarin was crap before the Microsoft acquisition, it was improving at great pace afterwards and it's pretty integrated into .NET standard story (but still crap last time I used it 3 years ago) - I don't even see how you could say anything like they left them alone, feels more like they got rolled up in to .NET devision, again for the better of both (Mono was still the only solution for some scenarios until very recently even outside of mobile)
Github is still Github.
Of course Microsoft played a part in the progress. Try to be more generous with your nitpicking.
Github is a separate issue, they can't rebrand without huge value loss.
Is the Xamarin brand still strong?
Yes.
Nothing else is important. It is clearly a separate brand which is OBVIOUSLY going to be integrated (otherwise why buy it?)
But it remains a differentiable entity with the power of Microsoft behind it.
Continue nitpicking.
Interestingly, it looks like Teams was at one point code-named "Skype Spaces" - a name which occasionally appears in Teams deep link URLs.
* see this job ad here: https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/job/834482/Site-Reliabil...
The Teams comms/meeting stack was its own thing - an evolution (or frankenstein's monster mix) of Skype for Business and Skype Consumer technologies. That is one of the reasons why Teams did not have interop capabilities with SfB at launch.
Side note: The Skype for Business communications stack is a descendent of Lync/Office Communicator was completely separate from Skype Consumer (only thing it shared was branding).
Source: worked on Teams
Does anyone else remember when housing data in US severs was considered less private than alternatives? It’s incredible that Azure, and the rest of the us based cloud providers, have been able to rebrand American severs as the cloud so successfully that they are well known for being secure and safe.
The example I like to give is the one given by John Hooker, who taught comparative culture at CMU. As it is, U.S. jokes are often not funny to many continental Europeans. Chinese humor is of a whole other bent.
Another interesting comparison point are Japanese websites, which are borderline unnavigable (to me) because they avoid any use of larger fonts.
Right now much of Europe considers storing data in the US to be less private than hosting it locally. The US is certainly not in the same category as Russia or China, but it's not great either.
https://www.dlapiper.com/en/us/insights/publications/2018/04...
Disclaimer: I work in Azure but not on this, so my info may be wrong.
Outlook pesters you for a Chinese phone number (internet phone doesn't work), probably so it's easier for the users to be tracked.
I assume they've made whatever CCP requirements are necessary in order to operate there.
That said, they'd at least protect western accounts in the US if they bought TikTok.
Like Github and LinkedIn, I think this would be a smart move. Microsoft has also been a lot better stewards of these companies than they were back in the days of the Skype acquisition (2011, Steve Ballmer time). It's still amazing the turn around they've had after Ballmer left, people underestimate the effect of bad leadership at the top.
So you're saying that GitHub isn't a social network for coding?
https://docs.github.com/en/github/getting-started-with-githu...
https://medium.com/glitch/github-glitch-and-the-future-of-so...
it might help for some people
Personally, i'm a little bit concerned that microsoft just received a $10bn DOD contract, and now the US government is essentially forcing a sale of TikTok to Microsoft. I'm not convinced that the company running the hot new social network (as well as all our source code) owing a bunch of favours to the US govermnent is really any better than it being subject to the Chinese government.
the odds that chinese goverment data collection ever affects me is minimal. as a canadian citizen who sometimes visits the US and routinely uses services provided by american companies, the odds that US government data collection affects me in some way is pretty high.
https://globalnews.ca/news/4461315/will-your-cannabis-credit...
Yahoo was also an incompetent operator with almost no solid business criteria or long term strategy. For 15 years or more Yahoo was simply a wannabe Google and never managed to find their business character.
I mean, it’s almost criminal to compare the performance of Microsoft vs Yahoo as operators. They are in different leagues.
For the US government, whose only concern is who does and doesn't get to harvest the data from any spyware, yes.
For everyone else, I'm not sure how that resolves any spyware concern.
If you don’t get it, pause for a moment, and think what would happen if China would suggest that Huawei should buy a successful Western service operating in China to avoid a national security risk.
Pompeo is right when he says that this is like another Cold War, but with just one big difference: it’s America that’s playing the role of Russia now.
https://twitter.com/CGasparino?s=21
I don’t know how reputable the source is.
https://www.foxbusiness.com/person/g/charles-gasparino
He doesn't say the source, only reports it, so not sure what the issue is here.
You can even see it in the headline to this story: "Sources speculate one name to buy TikTok is Microsoft"
I get that there’s a national security angle to this, but I imagine there would be outrage if he unilaterally decided to break up Facebook, for example.
In fact, it's even possible that the government is involved in this purchase in some form, by either using their good standing as big MS customers (how many federal employees run Windows+Ms Office computers?), or by offering money directly, something that is purported to have happened when Microsoft purchased Skype a few years ago. Getting rid of E2EE for Skype, which Microsoft eventually did, was a big request of the US intelligence community.
Ultimately it'd be a good resolution to the issue. No more spying by China and American teenagers can safely continue using the app.
They're targetting different demographics, and are used very differently (Job searching vs short-form videos).
Congratz on new cat Mike!