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Microsoft is reportedly in talks to buy TikTok's US operations

businessinsider.com

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Re: Microsoft is reportedly in talks to buy TikTok's US operations

#181
post #178

I think it's a clever play. 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 a…

> 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 think its more of the rebranding from US-gov spying to Chinese-gov spying

Re: Microsoft is reportedly in talks to buy TikTok's US operations

#183

Not a single person seem to think that it is odd that we can simply order a foreign company to sell their business to an American company.

Well, probably because that's not what is happening. The US has the right to ban companies from the country (as do other countries). What the US is saying is that the parent company (Bytedance) bust divest Tik Tok or they'll lose access to the US market. Microsoft is interested in it, but it could be a different company buying it. This is different than "you must sell this company to this other company" because the U…

Is there any precedence where the executive branch just ban a foreign company without citing the violation of law and going through court or WTO, in the last century?

Re: Microsoft is reportedly in talks to buy TikTok's US operations

#184

What value does Microsoft get out of this? Looks like a desperate deal pushed by TikTok to get rid of "Chinese spyware" tag. The deal makes no absolute sense.

They gain access to a huge community of mostly young people to promote their gaming products. You pair it with a good chat service, which they already have through Teams or Skype, and then you can take on Twitch or Discord, which are also gaining a lot of traction.

Re: Microsoft is reportedly in talks to buy TikTok's US operations

#185
post #76

Hopefully it will be rebranded MikMok or ZuneZok. 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.

>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 ge…

would Minecraft almost fit into that as well? At least from the sense of buying an existing community.

Re: Microsoft is reportedly in talks to buy TikTok's US operations

#187
post #178

I think it's a clever play. 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 a…

> 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.

> 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.

Re: Microsoft is reportedly in talks to buy TikTok's US operations

#189
post #149
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jokes aside, it probably would be a nice addition to their consumer-oriented portfolio (i.e. xbox, minecraft, etc), if they're planning to stay relevant in the FAANG-taking-over-the-world state of reality these days.

Steve Jobs once said about Microsoft that their only problem is that they have no taste. And it's decisions like this that illustrate what he meant. TikTok is such a clash with everything Microsoft stands for as a company (if there is such a thing). It makes no sense.

It's still a $1T+ company, that's the metric that matters when evaluating the "worth" of a business. So in that sense, the market has a "taste" for Microsoft.
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