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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 L
by slipheen 6y ago
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 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.
- sanxiyn 6y agoTikTok is not a "youth-based social network". It is more similar to YouTube, with content creator ecosystem and advertisement profit sharing and all.
- slipheen 6y agoFrom https://www.omnicoreagency.com/tiktok-statistics/ https://www.omnicoreagency.com/tiktok-statistics/ > 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.
- sprite 6y agoWhat percentage is between 13-15? Or younger and lying about it. I would think 16-24 is their older user base.
- nicky0 6y agoMy friend's kids, ages 9 and 11, are both obsessed with TikTok along with most of their school.
- sanxiyn 6y agoI was more against "social network" part than "youth-based" part. TikTok is a broadcast media, not a social network.
- slipheen 6y agoFair 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.
- sanxiyn 6y agoFacebook 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.
- thisisnico 6y agoIt's growing on everyone, all ages.
- rmorey 6y agoI agree that they botched Skype, but I think some of their more recent acquisitions - namely: Mojang, Xamarin, GitHub - have gone pretty well, IMO
- cheez 6y agoI believe the trend here is they left them alone...
- dtech 6y agoGithub 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.
- cheez 6y agoHaving the resources of Microsoft and a vision you want to execute on might be why they allowed themselves to get bought.
- mullingitover 6y agoI 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.
- Cshelton 6y agoWell, 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).
- bradley195 6y agoI believe Teams was a separate technology to begin with - not just rebranded Skype
- iphone_elegance 6y agoYes, but it's nice that Skype is out of the way
- hyperrail 6y agoThough 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. * see this job ad here: https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/job/834482/Site-Reliability-Engineer https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/job/834482/Site-Reliabil...
- Cshelton 6y agoYeah, 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.
- skronch 6y agoThe '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). Source: worked on Teams
- yalogin 6y agoWhat 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.
- nsl73 6y ago> 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.
- talloaktrees 6y agoI 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.
- setr 6y agoI think its more of the rebranding from US-gov spying to Chinese-gov spying
- thephyber 6y agoAgree. I'm curious if it becoming a US-owned app means it would struggle in China.
- lvturner 6y agoIn China they have a separate app owned by ByteDance called Douyin - in fact iirc TikTok was an aquisition that they then modeled after Douyin
- lambdasquirrel 6y agoI'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.
- fossuser 6y agoOutlook 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.
- skwb 6y ago| give them a better foothold in Social Networking than Linked-in provides. So you're saying that GitHub isn't a social network for coding?
- pmlnr 6y agoGithub is not a social network, and is should never be one.
- skwb 6y agoI completely agree. My snarky comment was in reference to GitHub's marketing emphasis a few years ago on "social coding". https://docs.github.com/en/github/getting-started-with-github/be-social https://docs.github.com/en/github/getting-started-with-githu... https://medium.com/glitch/github-glitch-and-the-future-of-social-coding-5e6faa45c8f2 https://medium.com/glitch/github-glitch-and-the-future-of-so...
- ilrwbwrkhv 6y agoDifference is yahoo had arguably one of the worst CEOs ever: Marissa Mayer where as Microsoft has a wizard: Satya Nadella.
- jjoonathan 6y agoAt the time she was considered a star, at least in my circles.
- rabuse 6y agoNobody kills a product like Yahoo. I've always said that everything they acquire dies, and then they sell it for near nothing.
- totetsu 6y agodeleting irreplaceable cultural history as they go
- whereistimbo 6y agoWhat's worst about Marissa Mayer? she arrived when things gone worse. I argued the worst was Jerry Yang.
- notatoad 6y ago>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.
- torbital 6y agoA company occasionally working together with the US government is very different than China's state-run companies.
- knolax 6y agoWhich ByteDance is not.
- notatoad 6y agoyou'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.
- smnrchrds 6y agoIndeed the US data collection can have a much deeper and more immediate negative effect on Canadians' lives. https://globalnews.ca/news/4461315/will-your-cannabis-credit-card-purchases-be-visible-to-u-s-border-officials-some-might-some-wont/ https://globalnews.ca/news/4461315/will-your-cannabis-credit...
- GoodJokes 6y agoRight, one works with the US and one works with China is different. US = good and China = bad. This is how world works. Grunt grunt
- dragonwriter 6y ago> It would help address the spyware concern by moving it to a US company 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.
- camillomiller 6y agoA 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.
- throwaway1545 6y agoI 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.