TikTok wouldn’t be selling its US operations to Microsoft. “We look forward to seeing how the service evolves in these important areas,” Microsoft said in a tersely worded blog post. That’s like a jilted teenager, saying good luck after being spurned. I thought the whole notion of Microsoft buying TikTok was a bad idea anyway. And as I said in my tweet this afternoon, “Dear Microsoft, Congrats on dodging the bullet. You could have become the tech’s Howard Marshall II.”
In an earlier post, I had raised the question about why the US Government was pushing Microsoft to be the company to buy TikTok’s operations in the US and some other parts of the world. Does Microsoft enjoy some sort of most favored nation status with the government? Who knows, but for now, I am glad that a company with a considerable cloud opportunity won’t get distracted. TikTok is a political hot potato.
I wonder if the banning of TikTok has less to do with platform and its owners and is more to do with TikTokers. I mean there isn’t much love lost between those in charge and the teens.
A recent survey by Fortune magazine and SurveyMonkey was quite revealing.
We found the public isn’t thrilled by the executive order, however, they aren’t strongly opposed to it either. Among U.S. adults, 50% oppose Trump’s executive order to force a sale of TikTok’s U.S. business, 41% support the order, and 9% are unsure. But there is a huge generational divide: TikTok is synonymous with Gen Z, and they’re supporting the app in this fight with the White House. Among adults age 18 to 24, 62% oppose the executive order to force a sale of TikTok. And 65% of TikTok users oppose it.
Updated on September 14, 2020: Oracle today confirmed that it has made an offer to be a technology provider to TikTok. In other words, this is an offer to host TikTok US in Oracle’s data center and its US-based servers. No, Oracle isn’t guying TikTok US. It is going to provide a service. This is a good face-saving move for the White House. I will abstain from saying anything more than this whole thing has is a farce.