Oops, it looks like you weren't licensed to disparage Oracle. We can settle this now for $100,000. Sorry for your confusion on our incredibly clear terms and conditions which change so rarely and are easy to find. (SARCASM)
Your comment made me chuckle as I pictured Larry Ellison with his MAGA hat turned backwards, a "Music Band" shirt, and a skateboard slung over his shoulder saying "How do you do, fellow kids?" on a TikTok video.
Oh, of course Larry is a human. And a young one at that. Just look at how tight his face is. That's how you know how young a human person is... the tightness of their face skin. Just like the tight faces of other youthful humans.
Imagine if a company like Eastman Kodak were selected to rebuild the national stockpile of medical supplies that were depleted by COVID. It's kinda like that.
Oracle sells enterprise software, and it has a pretty bad reputation in some engineering circles due to their aging technology and bad business practices. They don’t have any significant business lines in social or consumer tech AFAIK.
In this sense, they seem like they would have no clue about the needs and wants of teenagers, therefore making an odd match for TikTok
Even one of their few products useful to sole traders and very small SMBs, VirtualBox, is impossible to purchase in individual license (in the UK at least). They're almost openly hostile to anything smaller than Enterprise.
Apart from all the political discussions, I have no idea how the buyer is supposed to buy out just some regional markets.
Would development still be done by the original company, and the new owner just operates regional data centers? But without inter-connectivity? Without being able to influence development, or offer access to the developers for debugging and ops? Seems exceedingly unlikely.
Otherwise, do they get a code dump of a huge, complex code base, and are supposed to continue development on their own? With the original TikTok still operating in other parts of the world, and slowly diverging? I can't see that happening either.
Would they buy the brand name too, and the rest of the world would start using a different name?
That all seems pointless. The only thing that makes sense to me is taking over globally.
Yes, in China, it's a different app, called Douyin. (This is probably why the icon looks like a letter 'd'.) ByteDance says they're operationally separate from TikTok as of 2019.
I wasn't talking about China. All the leaks so far have only mentioned buying out the US / NA (or at most all English speaking) markets, not all of TikTok.
That's a good point. It's going to be a lot more complex to sell just TikTok's US operations than the whoe company, for all the reasons mentioned.
Still, I guess there is a positive to all this complexity. It's a perfect test case for what splitting up Google/Facebook/Apple/Microsoft/whatever would be like, assuming an antitrust cause goes ahead. You'd likely have many of the same issues there, so this could be a chance to see how things might play out in such a situation...
The huge hypocrisies here is that the sell must be done to a US company, not a European or an Indian one for instance but specifically a US one. I think that's a good lesson for the rest of the world, and a big warning.
Btw I think that following this and the Huawei little war, Apple is about to suffer from it. It's very probable that the Apple store will be forbidden in China. This will destroy Apple in China (impacting 18% Apple revenue), and it will at the same time preserve the image of China as the factory of the world.
This is just the beginning of a long war.
This isn't the beginning, the beginning was years ago.
> It's very probable that the Apple store will be forbidden in China. This will destroy Apple in China (impacting 18% Apple revenue), and it will at the same time preserve the image of China as the factory of the world
China has already forced Apple to hand over iCloud to a local Chinese company. iCloud in China is operated by GCBD (AIPO Cloud (Guizhou) Technology Co. Ltd).
Exactly this. The ban itself was fine. But to force sale of assets to a US company (which reduces bidding prices significantly) is just corrupt thuggish politics. At this point, a third country should be wary of doing any business in the US.
I took that as a big warning message, and started to reduce my US exposure as much as I can. I was already going self hosted so it’s easier for me. The only new requirement is avoiding American companies as much as possible.
What? its not worse than a ban, its so not worse that ByteDance could simply not sell its US operations and stop being present in the US, making it just like a ban. A ban would leave no option.
This is pretty much what China does, but for every service.
> This is pretty much what China does, but for every service.
Since when did we aspire to become more like China?
> its not worse than a ban, its so not worse that ByteDance could simply not sell its US operations and stop being present in the US, making it just like a ban
The difference is, why should a US entity own this asset for it to have operations in the US? Why can't it be a EU entity or Australian entity or Canadian entity or Ugandan entity?
Does this mean that US government is going to erratically force foreign businesses to sell US assets when they want?
The equivalent of this would be EU asking Apple to sell all EU operations to Nokia or whatever to be able to operate in that market. Does this sound business friendly?
First it was getting Kodak to manufacture pharmaceutical chemicals. Now it's getting Oracle to buy tiktok. Is there a reason behind these baffling choices by the current administration? Why are they giving sweetheart deals to dinosaur companies? Is there some insider trading angle? Did those companies have better lobbyists?
It’s certainly fair to consider nefarious reasons, but it’s also important to consider less interesting reasons, like Kodak already (historically) dealing heavily with chemical production and Oracle making a bid to pivot and stay relevant. Who else might want to pay the most for TikTok US? From FAANG, only Facebook seems like a fit but Facebook won’t pay “market” rate for TikTok because they already have Reels, Microsoft and AANG don’t seem like fits. Outside of those, it’s some private equity group but they would need to spin up an operation around actually running and developing TikTok, that’s complicated.
> like Kodak already (historically) dealing heavily with chemical production
This baffles me. What's left over? Has that business not been dead for decades, so what relevant asset would they still have? Machinery? Supply chain? Knowledgeable people? Seems like all of it should be long gone.
I suspect that FB would pay a lot for tiktok, as reels is probably too early to have traction. The whole antitrust investigation will a) make it skittish and b) make government regulators unlikely to approve the deal.
Consider that people are pushing FB to divest instagram, something it has invested a ton in post-acquisition! Do you think the DOJ would allow FB to buy another giant social network?
Microsoft has consistently been in the top three companies by market cap — whereas Netflix is basically nowhere to be found — but I guess FAAMG just isn’t as cool!
Netflix pays engineers a lot and presents an interesting technology challenge. But you're right. They're actually a pretty amazing story. Burned 10 billion in the last 5 years and probably at least double that over their life. And they're on their third business model at this point with the first two having, more or less, failed.
According to the Financial Times[1], it's Microsoft-envy and close ties to Trump.
“I still think it’s possible to beat Microsoft, believe it or not, for us to be a more important company than Microsoft,” Mr Ellison told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2014. Since then his nemesis in the software business has soared on the back of the booming cloud computing market, while Oracle’s fortunes have sagged.
Oracle operates in the guts of large-scale IT systems, selling the databases and business applications that are core to the way large organisations run. But it has lost ground to Amazon, Microsoft and Google as corporate computing has moved to the cloud.
The Oracle chairman has also kept close ties to the Trump administration that could pay off as the president looks for a quick resolution. Both Mr Ellison, who now serves as Oracle’s technology strategist, and Safra Catz, its chief executive, have been close to the Trump White House. Ms Catz was a member of the president’s transition team in 2016, while Mr Ellison recently hosted a fundraising dinner for the president.
Oracle is also one of only three companies to have been granted more than one seat on the president’s task force to reopen the economy following the coronavirus lockdown — Mr Ellison and Ms Catz have been granted places.
The administration opposes economic freedom, and is attempting to replicate the sort of heavy-handed approach to meddling with private businesses that is traditionally associated with authoritarian regimes.
There is absolutely no reason to ban TikTok in the first place, and Trump's comments about the sale enriching the treasury are outlandish and should themselves disqualify him for office.
The US is giving up any shred of credibility it had with respect to fostering fair competition in US markets.
I mean I read the article and Trump simply said they'd be a good buyer. There is nothing about "sweetheart deals" or any actual facilitation of the deal whatsoever.
Perhaps “sweetheart” isn’t the best description but he did make an executive order specifically targeting TikTok putting the company in position where their bargaining power is more limited. TikTok having to choose between fighting the current administration in court or selling to an American buyer within some fixed time period likely is advantageous to the buyer no matter who buyer is.
I don't mean this as a joke but it will probably sound like one: Maybe Trump wants to punish TikTok and their users by having the second most unlikeable man in America run it.
Many here don't get the big picture. This acquisition makes total sense for Oracle. They'll be able to milk those influencers by charging TikTokers by how many cores they have on their phones and video audience size. </s>
Among all the feasible buyers, Oracle feels like the worst possible one. They are basically the real life version of Mr. Robot's Evil Corp, and they have a very bad record when it comes to acquisitions.
I don't understand the hate for TikTok I frequently see on HN. Is it just ordinary ageism/curmudgeonliness?
I'm not in its core audience myself, but it seems to me to be a very smartly put together app, both in its core features (practically the only video remixing/editing app for mobile that retains tolerable levels of both accessibility and expressiveness) and in its platform (particularly the recommendation engine which seems to drive pretty solid engagement).
It's cognitive dissonance. America is supposed to be the good guys, but on American social media everyone is toxic and hates each other and it's all full of political and corporate AstroTurfing; China is supposed to be the bad guys, but on TikTok everyone's happy and enjoying themselves and the content is organic and largely apolitical.
The easiest way to get rid of the cognitive dissonance is not to fix US social media, but to get rid of TikTok.
That's because TikTok does pretty heavy 'auditing' - the content is NOT organic at all. Only the good-looking people and the happy videos go to the top. The others go to the bottom or are 'disappeared'
Or it could be that we just don’t like apps that exist to Hoover up personal information and/or be state sponsored spying endpoints, no matter who makes them.
Correct answer, downvoted of course since this is HN. I personally don’t care about privacy too much, but the way TikTok operates and its ties with the Chinese government is more than a little concerning. The videos are fun, too bad about the content.
TikTok is notorious for siphoning as much private data as it can without being clear about that with the user. Apart from that the concept of TikTok has already been done in the past and it seems to me they didn't fail for technological or business reasons, but because they didn't have the money to fight against bigger players
"According to those reports, Oracle was seriously considering buying TikTok's businesses in the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand with investment firms, including General Atlantic and Sequoia Capital."
The US is 10% of TikTok's user base but 50% of revenue. Most of TikTok's most-followed users are American (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-followed_TikTok_a...). Canada, Australia, and New Zealand are probably another 5% of revenue. The UK may be not included because TikTok has stated that it wants to establish its global headquarters there.
There has been talk that Microsoft is interested in buying all of TikTok worldwide (TikTok isn't available in China; ByteDance has a separate, similar business there), which would be easier technically because TikTok's operations and algorithms would not need to be divided. India was TikTok's largest userbase until the recent ban; presumably a non Chinese-owned TikTok could quickly reopen there.
Does TikTok actually make any revenue itself yet? I know its top users are making millions from advertising stuff, but they don't seem to have any ads in the platform itself yet?
ByteDance is said to be pulling close to 17B/year, and they have 3 main apps - Toutiao (Chinese news app), Douyin (Chinese TikTok), and of course TikTok.
Did you just starting to use TikTok? Many platforms show less ads to new users, in order to not scare them away and it's not until you've used it for a longer period of time that they ramp up how many ads you're seeing. Also different profiles gets different amount of ads.
Yeah, this surprised me too. As sceptical as I am of TikTok and its "I can't believe it's not malware" approach to privacy I feel a bit sorry for the poor sods actually developing it. Oracle are going to beat the world record for deepest borehole with how hard they'll run the app into the ground.
I don't think you need the /s tag there, that's exactly what I expect to happen.
I really don't understand what Ellison is trying to accomplish here? Aside from making more money, of course, but I'd be hard pressed to think of a less synergistic combo than Oracle's aging dinosaur enterprises and TikTok's fickle teenagers.
> I really don't understand what Ellison is trying to accomplish here?
Appeasing Trump?
> Aside from making more money, of course
He can push Trump to lower the price, with the force of the United States Government behind it, then flip it to Microsoft for twice the price in 3 months when Trump loses the election.
In Act III, Revenge of the Mogul, Murdoch convinces the Australian government to draft new legislation requiring Google and Facebook to subsidise News Corporation's loss making newspapers by paying him for the clicks that send readers to his own websites.
Vine was cool, when it existed, and there are many vine videos which got uploaded to YouTube, and there are many Vine compilations on YT with millions of views.
Vine was cool - the reason it died had more to do with Twitter pretty much being in a death spiral before Trump became president. However, the biggest innovation TikTok brought was their own flavor of the algorithmic feed that made finding content a lot easier.
Bytedance acquired Musical.ly in 2017, and merged it into TikTok the next year. The administration is now blocking the sale of Musical.ly under Section 721 of the Defense Production Act. Section 721 "authorizes the President to suspend or prohibit a transaction, by or with any foreign person, that may result in control of a U.S. business by a foreign person and that may threaten to impair national security." [1] The president used this power to block the sale of Musical.ly on national security grounds.
Congressional approval is not needed for this action. The legal framework was approved by Congress with the Foreign Investment and National Security Act of 2007. The president has the legal authority to issue such national security orders. However, typically the president delegates the national security review to CFIUS, a government agency.
TikTok never received clearance from CFIUS when it acquired Musical.ly in 2017 [3]. This allows the US to preform a national security review now, three years later.
To answer your question, Bytedance is not legally 'forced' to divest their US operations. They are proceeding with the sale because the alternative is a death blow to their US operations.
Looks like both Bytedance and Musical.ly are Cayman islands, so I'm not sure how the US has any say in what they do, though I understand the spirit is "do what we want or lose the US (and possibly the world) market".
I don't know how anything the US does can affect what two companies in a different country decide to do between them, legally speaking. The executive order sounds weird to me.
Also, I don't understand how they can block a sale three years later. What's the time frame on that? Why not ten years later? A hundred?
The US can embargo the product and prevent its use in the US. This is a significant enough market to the company that they'd rather have whatever the discounted sale price of a forced sale than what they think the future value of (Tiktok - USA - India - other US Allies that get encouraged to do the same) is.
I'm not quite sure what to explain, since it is basically indistinguishable from the way any other racketeer operates. This is pretty much the same thing as asking somebody at gunpoint to sell his Rolex to you for $20, or else you take it by force. The victim is at loss anyway, but when choosing between $20 and nothing, they may as well choose $20.
US market makes up a large portion of TikTok's revenue, some say 50%. So it can threaten to destroy that market completely, for nothing, forbidding TikTok and causing the loss of what is currently 50% of its revenue. Or it can offer some money (an amount, which normally wouldn't be enough to sell) to take it, or at least a part of it. Time will tell if TikTok will find the risk worth the trouble.
I'm still not sure how that would work. Sure, they could forbid people from downloading new versions of the app, but the existing app is already out there on phones - would they be able to force removal of the app?
This is not what is proposed, nor is what would happen. Speech protections are very strong in the US and direct censorship of an otherwise legal application is not likely to be a legal possibility.
What the executive does have the authority to do is regulate commerce. The proposal is that ByteDance would be embargoed from doing business in the US. This means, they can't pay for app store developer licenses, sell ads in the US, buy local CDN/cloud infrastructure etc.
You could have the app, but it's not likely that ByteDance would be able to operate it in the US.
Well, I won't suggest any scenarios of how it would work right now, even though I don't think it's totally inconceivable... I'll just point out that I don't actually need a loaded gun to make you sell your Rolex for $20. I only need you to believe it's loaded.
that doesnt really matter too much.
US advertisers won't be able to pay tiktok. Basically 0 money for bytedance, while plenty of trafic expenses if they keep servicing.
And ofc, apple and google can simply remove the app from your phone.
The equation is a bit similar to the one played out in the movie "Goodfellas".
You have two mobsters, the good mobster and the bad mobster, and a business. The bad mobster actively harasses the business in multiple ways, prompting the business to seek protection from the good mobster in exchange for buying into the business.
Of course, both the good mobster and the bad mobster are in the same mob, and benefit from the revenue stream from the newly acquired stake in business.
They can't, but they can prevent a foreign company from doing business in the US (and from US companies doing business with a foreign company)—which is what they're doing.
Bytedance (TikTok) can "work around this problem" by selling their US business to a US company—which is what they're doing.
It's shady, completely legal, and fully up to the President/executive branch (e.g. Trump) to set policies in this area.
They've banned US transactions with the company. This means TikTok can no longer publish to Play Store/App Store. Android users could sideload an APK but that's still a huge blow. Lastly a social media app operating in the US that can't sell ads to US marketers is pointless.
As an alternative, Trump proposed letting a US company buy TikTok to get around the ban. As you'd expect, TikTok's investors are looking for a sale so they don't lose their investment.
They also can’t pay staff in the us or have bank accounts. Once us banks ban someone the rest of the world (except a few like China and Russia) usually follow for fear of the ban coming to them next.
>I heard Oracle is deep into really shitty kinds of user tracking/spying.
Absolutely not defending Oracle, but who isn't into shitty user tracking and spying? It's a central part of most business models, because they give the service away for free.
Like using gray legal area devices to track you in the real world even if you never signed any agb. Like tracking Bluetooth IDs in and around shopping center, like tracking the anti theft/processing pipeline RFID ships which might still be left in your closes, like adding spyware to apps which listens to ultrasonic sound bakons in the background and then phones home. Like using face recognition on security cameras in shops but potentially also in the streets around them.
I.e. all the kinds a questionable tracking which many people aren't aware of at all (as far as I can tell).
And Oracle seems to be big into bringing all this tracking sources and data from Google/Facebook/etc. and data they can get from other sources (e.g. finance institutes) together and automatically analyze it to create profiles about everyone.
Through only as far as I remember, it's a while back that I read about that. I somewhat hope that I'm misremembering tbh. Would be a nicer world.
Well considering they completely butchered their GDPR compliance to leverage said data overseas w.r.t digital audiences (they just had to pull out) I'd guess they would like the idea of more activity data, but don't have much confidence they'll get much value from it.
TikTok feels a completely bizarre purchase for Oracle. Especially when abandoning the UK market.
They have no synergy, no experience, no moderation infrastructure, nothing. Do they want to be Yahoo?
Literally the only justification I can think of is that they want to keep the current administration happy and see this as a quasi-bribe, in the hope of getting more work in future from them in things they actually do. But that seems crazy given the likelihood (on the basis of polling, not making any judgements on whys or wherefores) that the administration will be gone in three months.
I can’t be alone in being more creeped out by Oracle than bytedance. So we’re giving a pathological collector of software control over a huge group of easily manipulated teenagers? Yikes!
Our prime minister would not be allowed to have an opinion on any specific case like this, he would rather have to have opinions on the overall legal framework or such instead and leave the interpretation and application of the legal framework to the appropriate agencies.
To me that feels like the right way to go about things like this.
I believe youre seeing an artifact of how governance is divided. It looks like sweden (and many other parliamentary systems) puts the administration & execution of law under the direction of a minister, who’s primarily a legislator.
In the USA these areas are more clearly divided. The federal legislature is comprised of a bicameral house and senate. There is a discrete executive branch charged with enforcing the law set by the legislature. The president is the head of that executive branch who enforces those laws. Thats where the aspect of specific enforcement by the president comes in.
That separation exists in Sweden as well. The parliament makes the laws while the government is the executive branch.
But yeah, slightly different as its our prime minister who sets up the government, the parliament who picks the prime minister and the people who elects the parliament – through proportional representation.
The ban on ministerial rule is an additional separation on top of the one you mention – a separation within the executive branch, that even further avoids opportunities for eg. corruption. (And confuses foreign leaders who are unfamiliar with it)
The other factor is likely the US's general lack of a professional civil service leadership. The leadership of the US civil service is largely appointed, en masse, by the new president every four to eight years. This is unusual in other developed democracies; there usually is a mechanism for the executive or legislature to get rid of senior civil service officials, but doing so is controversial, very visible, and not routine.
The US has always suffered from an extremely politicised administrative body, the extreme powers given to the president are an example of this, but in many other ways there is a lack of administrative independence as well, you can just look at all the diplomatic vanity appointments of the administration.
In pretty much every other functioning democracy diplomats and heads of agencies are trained, in the US these posts get handed out like candy to however throws the president an election party.
Everyone has a number. I wouldn't want to work for Oracle either. However, if they came to me with an offer that was several multiples of my current salary, I'm not sure I could turn it down :)
Can someone explain this potential acquisition for me? I cant think of a company more unlikely to acquire TikTok than Oracle. What business need could they fill for Oracle? Is this an effort to get into social media/massive data collection in a big way? Have they tried to acquire other social apps in the past?
This is shrewd of Ellison to do this. He knows he is the edge as he is a trump supporter. However it’s a terrible idea for tiktok to sell to oracle, a dinosaur that has no idea how to deal with consumer tech. I still don’t know why these companies want tiktok in the first place. It will be a nightmare to disconnect them from China and even then all the Chinese employees who dreamed up the tech are not coming, what’s the point?
Also I suspect this is just election pandering from trump. Initially he gave a 45 day “chance” for companies to find a buyer and then extended it by another 45 days. That takes it close to the election or past that date. At that point he doesn’t care and can push it under the rug just like the other “harsh stances “ against China.
This really isn't that shrewd. The outcomes are either 1) to drive up MSFT's TikTok acquisition price 2) to disrupt the sale process and harm or destroy TikTok 3) to ingratiate themselves with the current president or 4) the gambit is sincere and they successfully acquire them.
None of those address Oracle's core challenges which that they are getting hollowed out by competition in their core database market, are being outcompeted by Workday and SFDC in CRM and ERP verticals, and one just has to look at the comments here to see how they are perceived in the market. This may be temporarily gratifying, but is ultimate a distraction for them when they should not be distracting themselves.
ByteDance and their investors are going to get a nice cash infusion on their way to world domination outside the US and Oracle will promptly kill it like they did Sun.
Public corporations are inherently immoral manipulators. We shouldn’t trust any of them with massive access to the nations “youth.” At least private companies have a chance of maybe having a founder with a heart who will turn down a sketchy way to make money
Aren't the countries banning TikTok becoming more like China by doing this? Plus Trump comments about US gov needs to get money from this sale sounds like plain bribe.
I have not seen a convincing proof that TikTok is more of a national security threat versus FB or Twitter. What am I missing? I am also more suspicious because along with TikTok, Wechat was banned while other investments in US by Tencent where not touched supposedly because it would impact American companies. Wechat is definitely insignificant to be a security threat.
TikTok should just let the US government ban them. Teenagers can figure out how to VPN to Mexico and it's better PR for TikTok. "So good the government won't let you use it" is better optics than "TikTok, now owned by some Boomer company". As a hip youngster myself, just the name Oracle makes me think of beige and grey Windows Vista era software and shitty enterprise software.
The problem is that with a transaction ban, no US companies can buy ads on TikTok, removing any financial point in running the service for US customers
Proving that TikTok is just a money-making enterprise, not a CCP tentacle manipulating foreign elections. Otherwise they you just run it at a loss, like Voice of America or RT.
Most teenagers already use VPNs to get past network filters used in school WiFis and child filters on their data plans. Plus pornhub operates their own VPN so we know using a VPN to access just one service is something people already do. I think this idea of a mindless consumer is an unhealthy attitude tech people have that leads to so much shitty software. People who don't browse HN can use computers too.
A VPN wouldn't be necessary. Most of USG's totalitarian restrictions have been developed around commercial activity. Individuals are free to run whatever software we'd like, and talk with whatever servers we'd like. The user-facing choke point is Apple/Google control over software distribution.
No VPN would be necessary. The US has not proposed censoring the TikTok application, nor does the US president have the authority to censor otherwise legal speech.
>Nobody really cares about Oracle and its corporate image outside of the software industry
Quite a few non-tech corporations that use their products care. I consult for Fortune 2000 companies and "getting off Oracle" is probably a top 3 IT priority for most of them.
That aside, I can't think of any logical reason why Oracle would even want to buy them. It would be like Google buying a dry cleaning chain. There's no synergy whatsoever.
You used to hear a lot about this sort of concern in countries like Mexico etc, and would be slightly relieved that it was so much less common where you lived. Responsible first world governments are supposed to be neutral
Larry is a Trump supporter because he can make money through pay-for-play agreements with Trump and the administration. Oracle is not going to enjoy the long term effects of Trumps immigration policies, and once it hits Larry where it hurts
(his pocketbook) he will suddenly support the DNC again...
