>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.

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?

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.

A company occasionally working together with the US government is very different than China's state-run companies.

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.

Indeed 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...

Which ByteDance is not.

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.

> 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.

Canada too.

Even so, Canadians trust Americans far more than the Chinese. If they move everything over then it may stop mass bans across the West.

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.

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.

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.

https://www.dlapiper.com/en/us/insights/publications/2018/04...

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.

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

TIL. This is crazy

Indeed. This (CLOUD) of course runs counter to GDPR. Comply with one and fall foul of the other.

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.

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

Agree. I'm curious if it becoming a US-owned app means it would struggle in China.

In China they have a separate app owned by ByteDance called Douyin - in fact iirc TikTok was an aquisition that they then modeled after Douyin

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.

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.

I agree that they botched Skype, but I think some of their more recent acquisitions - namely: Mojang, Xamarin, GitHub - have gone pretty well, IMO

I believe the trend here is they left them alone...

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)

The fact that you can still talk about them as separate is what I mean. It isn't some MS brand Xamarin. It's still Xamarin.

Github is still Github.

Of course Microsoft played a part in the progress. Try to be more generous with your nitpicking.

What ? Xamarin is defacto Microsoft Xamarin, it's even integrated in to their domain and Xamarin Studio got rebranded to Visual Studio Mac.

Github is a separate issue, they can't rebrand without huge value loss.

I see the nitpicking continues.

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.

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.

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.

No comment on the merit of one vs other but with experience selling software, sometimes fewer features is better (lets you target better initially.)

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.

Having the resources of Microsoft and a vision you want to execute on might be why they allowed themselves to get bought.

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 did say "might be" :-)

Add LinkedIn for SNS

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).

Skype should have been in the position that Zoom has taken over.

I believe Teams was a separate technology to begin with - not just rebranded Skype

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.

* see this job ad here: https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/job/834482/Site-Reliabil...

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).

Source: worked on Teams

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.

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.

Difference is yahoo had arguably one of the worst CEOs ever: Marissa Mayer where as Microsoft has a wizard: Satya Nadella.

Nobody kills a product like Yahoo. I've always said that everything they acquire dies, and then they sell it for near nothing.

deleting irreplaceable cultural history as they go

What's worst about Marissa Mayer? she arrived when things gone worse. I argued the worst was Jerry Yang.

At the time she was considered a star, at least in my circles.

> 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.

| 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?

Github is not a social network, and is should never be one.

I 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-githu...

https://medium.com/glitch/github-glitch-and-the-future-of-so...

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.

TikTok is not a "youth-based social network". It is more similar to YouTube, with content creator ecosystem and advertisement profit sharing and all.

From 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.

What percentage is between 13-15? Or younger and lying about it. I would think 16-24 is their older user base.

My friend's kids, ages 9 and 11, are both obsessed with TikTok along with most of their school.

I was more against "social network" part than "youth-based" part. TikTok is a broadcast media, not a social network.

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.

It's growing on everyone, all ages.