exanimo_sai

The takeaways from this potential acquisition for me: - The splinternet is real - as a foreign business with US interests be aware which side of the splinternet you are positioned. (Stratechery wrote a good piece of the four way split of the internet between US, China, India and EU https://stratechery.com/2020/india-jio-and-the-four-internet...) - While this may appear as a weird adjacency for Microsoft to go into they have successfully run Xbox a consumer business for many years - The consumption ecosystem from user data and behaviour from TikTok acquisition can only bolster Microsoft - Social capital is a lucrative currency for any tech company especially one such as MS who has a lot of catching up to do to other Big Tech -

Link to the hearing and statements:

https://docs.house.gov/Committee/Calendar/ByEvent.aspx?Event...

Tim Cook's written statement is now available: https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/7009148/Tim-Cook-...

This is not really the next phase - retail has been on a downward trajectory since the first online sale was made. The spiral down just buffered by a global economy that was growing.

Working with Westfield back in 2008 there was talks already of redesigning mall footprints to have smaller stores that can act as pop-up shops/ collection points etc. However there was an overall equilibrium achieved as malls started playing into the idea that their differentiation was on "experience".

Shopping and going to the mall remains a highly social activity. And I believe will survive well past the pandemic. And perhaps stores will be smaller individually and act as both in-store sales, collection points for online purchases and pop-up stores to market new products.

I think it has a lot to do with how TikTok manages the balance between consumption and creation. Only a fraction of viewers on YouTube for example create content where a significant portion (55%) on TikTok both create AND Consume.

This was an analysis on TikTok vs YouTube and focuses on how TikTok leverages mimcry to overcome the initial burden of ideation and yields significant content creation for its platform.

"On Youtube, 79% of views accrue to only 10% of its creators. While on TikTok 55% of viewers also create videos. " https://4thquadrant.io/freearticles/business-models/tiktok-a...

Agreed, its baffling, and I guess the latest results on their coversion rate (8% of those who participated in free trial) reflects exactly how little traction the idea actually found.

(https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/8/21318060/quibi-subscriber-...)

While the transient audio conversation format is novel - Clubhouse lacks the key ingredient that makes social networks so powerful at scaling - the ability to generate sticky social capital and signal that capital effectively. They could perhaps succeed if there was some way to port the kudos a user receives from contributing to a rousing conversation into some marker attached to a profile signaling that this persons contribution warrants recognition.