You’re talking about a company that made Halo and Minecraft the face of its consumer gaming brand, calls their AI assistant “Cortana”, and their internal windows builds “redstone”.
Tiktok doesn’t make sense if you think of Microsoft as “not a social media company”, but it’s a part of a push to engage the GenZ audience that started with the Minecraft acquisition.
I’m old enough to remember reading jokes on slashdot on wintel, but for the younger GenZ audience, that’s not what Microsoft is known for. The brand value isn’t in the enterprise stuff HN looks at, but in their consumer facing side.
Does microsoft execute well on their consumer side? Results seems mixed, with Xbox doing ok and Mixer crashing and burning. We’ll see how this plays out.
Minecraft was a good acquisition. Xbox, by and large, has made good acquisitions. But the rumor isn’t Xbox is buying TikTok, it’s Microsoft.
I would argue that with the exception of Xbox, Microsoft doesn’t have a strong consumer play and I would further argue it doesn’t need it. The re-emphasis on developer tools (GitHub, WSL2, Windows Terminal, Visual Studio Code) and productivity (Office 365 and M365, Power Platform) has been a boon for the business. Pure consumer pursuits like Cortana or Windows Phone or Groove Music have not worked.
We’re not a company that has social in our DNA. GitHub and LinkedIn are acquisitions that are run with various degrees of autonomy, but even as independent entities, neither was ever social the way Twitter or Facebook are.
When you talk about brand value for Gen Z, I understand what you’re saying, but I fully disagree chasing that potential value has legs. How many times has Microsoft tried to be “cool” over the last 45 years and how many times has it failed at it? Microsoft is at its most successful when it stops trying to chase trends and be cool and just focuses on the stuff it is good at.
It's been so nice to see five years or so of relatively GOOD acquisitions. LinkedIn made sense: it's allowed for a legitimate Salesforce compete, especially when paired with Dynamics. GitHub was incredibly smart and it aligns well with the resurgent dev tools division and the cloud. Even Beam (Mixer), which was an utter failure from an execution standpoint, made sense as a vertical integration play with Xbox. It failed, but the idea behind it was solid. The OpenAI investment and other AI initiatives have all made tons of sense. Buying Xamarin was brilliant.
But this? What about Microsoft has any of the same DNA as TikTok?
Insanity. I really, really hope this is just a bad joke and us being used by TikTok to juice offers from other people.