TikTok Picks Oracle Over Microsoft In Trump-forced Sales Bid (www.cbc.ca) 137
Dave Knott quotes the CBC: The owner of TikTok has chosen Oracle over Microsoft as its preferred suitor to buy the popular video-sharing app, according to a source familiar with the deal.
Microsoft announced Sunday that its bid to buy TikTok was rejected, removing a leading suitor for the Chinese-owned app a week before President Donald Trump promises to follow through with a plan to ban it in the U.S.
The Trump administration has threatened to ban TikTok by mid-September and ordered ByteDance to sell its U.S. business, claiming national-security risks due to its Chinese ownership. The U.S. government worries about user data being funnelled to Chinese authorities.
Microsoft announced Sunday that its bid to buy TikTok was rejected, removing a leading suitor for the Chinese-owned app a week before President Donald Trump promises to follow through with a plan to ban it in the U.S.
The Trump administration has threatened to ban TikTok by mid-September and ordered ByteDance to sell its U.S. business, claiming national-security risks due to its Chinese ownership. The U.S. government worries about user data being funnelled to Chinese authorities.
Larry and trump are bff's (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Larry and trump are bff's (Score:5, Interesting)
I submitted too late. But here's some excerpts from the NYtimes.
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The Chinese owner of TikTok has chosen Oracle to be the app’s technology partner for its U.S. operations and has rejected an acquisition offer from Microsoft. It was unclear whether TikTok’s choice of Oracle as a technology partner would mean that Oracle would also take a majority ownership stake of the social media app, the people involved in the negotiations said.
Even if Oracle may try to close a deal, it is unclear whether Beijing would create new obstacles to the process. And election-year politics have hung over the negotiations from the start. Unlike many other technology companies, Oracle has cultivated close ties with the Trump administration. Its founder, Larry Ellison, hosted a fund-raiser for Mr. Trump this year, and its chief executive, Safra Catz, served on the president’s transition team and has frequently visited the White House.
Oracle was also poised to provide the administration with a system earlier this year to help with a planned study that would have enabled the wide release of the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid-19. While doctors had warned the drug could have dangerous side effects, Mr. Trump had promoted its possible use to treat patients infected by the coronavirus.
Oracle’s relationship with the administration has drawn scrutiny. In August, a Department of Labor whistle-blower said that Mr. Trump’s labor secretary, Eugene Scalia, had intervened in a pay discrimination case involving the company.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/0... [nytimes.com]
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I presume that was a troll and/or trying to be sarcastic.
The article is fairly straightforward and consistent, and not particularly biased.
Russia thinks their best interests are served by Trump being president. Based on various material, this would mostly be a choice that foments maximum discord in the USA more than extracting specific benefits from the administration.
China wants Trump out because, whatever else may be said about him, he has taken a hard line against China. He may not be succeeding at eleva
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Or, y'know, do that that thing no-one ever does around here...It's the second last paragraph.
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Re: Larry and trump are bff's (Score:5, Insightful)
As soon as Trump could make him money?
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Speaking of which what will Trump's cut of this deal be?
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The alleged president's payoff will come when Uncle Larry screws up TikTok so the kiddies abandon that platform for another. They were the ones claiming credit for inflating the presales of tickets to the alleged president's superspreader event in Tulsa. The alleged president is vengeful but not the brightest bulb on the tree.
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Nah, as soon as Uncle Larry realized just how corrupt the alleged president could be and that would help Uncle Larry in his attempt to get the JEDI contract. Unfortunately for Uncle Larry, the alleged president has the attention span of gnat and became briefly frightened that Bezos' Amazon would get the contract, so Microsoft became the winner.
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Letting your personal politics get in the way is indulgent and, more importantly, a dereliction of your duty to your employees and shareholders.
Maybe you would be willing to self-destruct a multi-billion dollar company in order to make some sort of half-assed howling at the moon political statement because you don't like Trump. However, you
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Ya, that's what Uncle Larry did. I recall back in the 80's when Oracle started their rise and every week would get a new press release out to the tech tabloids on how grand Oracle was. It was clearly bullshit then and is clearly bullshit now. Oh, and they had a reputation for screwing companies out of money for services rendered, just like Uncle Larry's hero in the ovoidal office. Responsibility enters through the door, circles around, and immediately leaves as there is no one of merit to take it.
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Re: Larry and trump are bff's (Score:2)
But even in 2000, there were a lot of 4GLs that didn't have Postgres support, which meant that to use it you had to roll your own library, or at the very least write a wrapper to the C/C++ API. Which was a non starter for most organisations, no matter how good Postgres itself was.
Re: Larry and trump are bff's (Score:2)
"It's a trap!" (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm smelling a rat here. Want to bet the Chinese government isn't about to step in and mess up this deal? Kicking Trump right in the stock market would be great payback, and if they [Xi's buddies] are discreetly betting on the volatility in October, then they can clean up on the downside, too.
As I've noted before, if TikTok is actually doing something illegal and wrong, then the company should be prosecuted. If wrong but not illegal, then the law should be fixed first. In all other cases Trump is full of his usual BS.
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1. Knock up a quick 'dancing ferrets' video-sharing app
2. Hoover ferret data back to China
3. Use the k-pop army to troll Trump rallies 'til you show up on his radar
4. Incur wrath / enforced sale
5. $Bn profit!
What's not to love? Where do I sign up?!
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I know you're making a joke, but not funny enough for my mod point if I ever had one.
However my point is that Step 2 needs to be illegal. Near as I can tell, right now there is no evidence of Step 2 having occurred in relation to TikTok, which might be evidence that there is a law on the books and TikTok didn't violate it. Additional evidence in the strongly divided national management structure TikTok has.
Not sure about your Step 1, too. Going viral is hard to do, but maybe the Chinese hordes would have ad
China wants Trump to win (Score:2, Insightful)
He is pulling out of the region. He makes the USA democratic system look bad -- thank Xi they don't have to put up with that in China. No other country takes him seriously or feels they can depend upon the USA.
Xi loves Trump.
But the democratic system does work, after a fashion. And it is likely that Trump will soon be gone. Cannot say the same for Xi.
Re:China wants Trump to win (Score:5, Insightful)
He is pulling out of the region. He makes the USA democratic system look bad -- thank Xi they don't have to put up with that in China. No other country takes him seriously or feels they can depend upon the USA.
Xi loves Trump.
Not really. It comes down to 2 things: predictability and control (and this is control in the sense of "influence", not "dictate/direct"). Leaders (even adversarial leaders) prefer to work with other leaders that they can either predict, or control. There's a certain safety there. Take, for example, the Cold War. The Americans and Soviets could generally predict how the other would react to specific events, which created a measure of stability. When you added uncertainty into the mix (such as the Cuban Missile Crisis) is when things started to look a little hairy.
With Trump, predictability goes right out the window. His latest course of action is more often as not driven by whoever he spoke to on the hone last, or whatever segment on Fox News got the best ratings yesterday. That leaves control. But control isn't possible without access, which Xi doesn't have. Trump has given access to certain leaders, namely Putin and Kim Jong Un, and they've been able to parley that into varying degrees of control. For KJU, simple flattery was enough to do the trick, to get Trump, the leader of the free world, to come meet with him in his own back yard. A huge domestic coup for KJU, allowing him to say the DPRK and the US are equals. But the likelihood that anything substantive would come out of those meetings was almost nil.
Now Putin, that's a whole new ball game. Trump fancies himself a master deal maker and relies heavily on his gut. Putin rose through the ranks of one of the biggest and most powerful intelligence agencies in history. He's smart, well informed, manipulative, and has a well thought out long term strategy. This is where the control comes in. Trump's belief in his own skills as a deal maker leads to over-confidence, and his reliance on gut feeling leads to a lack of preparedness. This opens up holes that Putin is able to exploit. To boil it down to a simple analogy: Putin is playing chess, Trump is playing Tic Tac Toe.
Now, in part because of the whole Russian investigation thing, Trump has played up China to be the big bad of his administration (and China certainly isn't good). The whole corona virus thing made it even worse. So Xi cannot ever have the access necessary to control Trump. And, as mentioned above, no one can really predict Trump. So that's why Xi prefers Biden. He can't control Biden, but he can predict him. Putin prefers Trump because he knows he can control him.
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The one amendment I would make is I think Putin may not have as much control as he would like (because Trump is too capricious to be well controlled), but he still likes Trump as his leadership has driven American culture to be hyper-focused on domestic squabbles more than global affairs. Also to the extent there is a significant foreign affairs effort in his administration, it's mostly about screwing over China even if it also inflicts domestic damage (from Russia's standpoint, a win-win).
So in short, Puti
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Re:China wants [long-term victory] (Score:2)
Concurrence, except with your continuation of the dubious subject. Trolls often poison discussions that way.
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Right, I'm sure Xi this thrilled at Trump and his cronies trying to destroy Huawei and various high value Chinese companies. They surely want another 4 years of that.
Which is why they are threatening to destroy Apple too... Because they know Trump likes iPhones?? Sorry your logic is completely broken.
Re:[That troll] wants Trump to win (Score:2)
Again expression concurrence except with the propagated Subject.
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erm, USA and democracy?
Seriously?
Re:China wants [democracy to lose, but w/o chaos] (Score:2)
erm, USA and democracy?
Seriously?
"It is what it is."
Predicate of this reply is that you were fishing for a funny mod. Peculiar bait, however.
Re:China wants long-term stability (Score:2)
You should be more clear about your pronouns. The initial "He" was quite confusing, but plugging in "Trump" made everything seem to fit properly. I'm still not sure about the "thank Xi" part, but I think it's a "thank gawd" joke.
So in conclusion, I think I mostly disagree with you. I think that Xi loves Trump's weakness and incompetence and inability to lead America in effectively competing with China, but overall I think he dislikes Trump's childishness and unreliability. Too hard to plan around because th
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TikTok is peanuts, and few people outside the kiddies in the U.S. will notice anything. This is purely the alleged president acting on spite because the TikTok kneebiters screwed up his Tulsa event for his sheep.
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I basically agree, though I'm not certain TikTok should be dismissed as peanuts because the value of IP is so hard to assess properly.
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Just the fact of oracle buying it is going to tank it as a 'fun & popular' app. Trump and Larry are going to drive Tik ToK stock into the toilet.
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Concurrence, but I think Ellison is often just after the customer/user information databases.
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I imagine what China is doing is offering to sell but will engineer it in such a way that nothing will be final until after the election. If Trump wins, they move ahead with the deal, because they can't hold out for four years. If Trump loses, they scuttle the deal, figuring they can tie any executive action up in court until Biden's inauguration. Biden will drop the matter, since the whole "President forces the sale of a company" thing is really move of Hugo Chavez move than anything American.
I will say th
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Just an ACK, but I did write a longer response that basically addresses your comment in the long branch off this comment.
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Another ACK, but my latest thinking is that Xi will trigger extreme market turbulence next month. Drive Trump even more insane, while letting Xi's friends profit on the insider trading. (You know Donald's friends have been doing it whenever they know about his next tweet.)
And my tweet of the day:
How to win the debates against Trump?
With a strong catchphrase:
"That's a lie, Donald. Now here's the truth."
Wait for Trump to call him "Joe" first to open the season.
Then repeatedly make Trump angry and get him to double and triple down on his lies.
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Someone in the top ranks received their Amazon package one day late.
Re:Larry and trump are bff's (Score:5, Informative)
The dirty truth (Score:5, Funny)
Re: The dirty truth (Score:2)
Re:The dirty truth (Score:5, Informative)
Ooooh, that brings back some nasty memories of Oracle's user-hostile 'gotcha' games when it came to auditing. You could be off by one license and they'd act like you just murdered their whole family.
Yeah, the one thing I remember the most is what a bunch of pricks they were right out of the gate.
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Does Oracle still charge per core? I can image that getting quite expensive with the progression we are seeing towards 64 core machines. And that's stuff that's available at the workstation level. I'm sure you can get stuff in the server market that has 256 cores (using multiple sockets) quite easily.
Kill off TikTok (Score:5, Funny)
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A lot of Oracle products are still around, so not sure how everyone is having that collective fantasy. Larry Ellison, who is a friend of Trump, will keep TikTok funded by using government/taxpayer funds if needed because it's a great tool for spying on people and law enforcement to find out individual behavioral patterns -- a usage Larry Ellison has supported in the interview video I posted in a comment below.
Re: Kill off TikTok (Score:5, Insightful)
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A lot of Oracle products are still around, so not sure how everyone is having that collective fantasy...
Speaking of collective fantasy, ever try and go against Oracle legally?
Now you know why they're still around. And when litigation is considered a legitimate recurring revenue stream, it says volumes as to just how shitty your product really is. You're not an Oracle "customer" so much as you're their bitch from a licensing perspective.
And Larry spying on citizens? With that content? What the hell are you going to learn? This months hottest dance move? A 2020 political meme? Give me a break. It's mor
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Not even that. A social platform lie this can be used to get data to better target political campaigns targeted at young people. Or to track protests in real time.
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My family wouldn't be a great source of info. But the child of an officer working at an Air Force base with TikTok on their phone? That's a totally different story. Even if it's just location tracking data from being driving around in the back of the minivan, the Chinese government would harvest a LOT of interesting information.
If we're concerned about GPS tracking with our military members/families and their smartphones, that cat was let out of the proverbial bag about 174,000 apps ago.
Here's a question on this theory; What other apps are banned on the phones of military personnel, their wives, and children for tracking reasons?
Yup. I thought so.
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I'm sure he'll also shut down the young folk (Score:1)
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Oh God so it will be TrumpTalk basically, used to brainwash the young and stupid. Though, it will be interesting to see how it will play with left wing bias among teachers and in schools. In my opinion schools should be ideologically neutral, or at least centrist and TikTok should cease to exist. TikTok being owned by a friend of Trump is nothing good.
Yep, they just changed the name. (Score:5, Funny)
It's now called "Jar Jar". and the squirting a social is called a "Bink".
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Somebody mod parent up!
Re:Yep (Score:2)
They chose to scuttle the ship .. Oracle is the fastest way to take functioning software and render it unusable ....
Perhaps Microsoft dodged a bullet... (Score:3)
I wonder if this will go down as Microsoft dodging a bullet by not making a deal. People focus on the deals made, but sometimes walking away is the best strategy.
No one writes up the misses... like the company that didn't buy AOL when Time Warner stepped in, or didn't invest in Jet with Walmart dropped a few billion.
I wonder if part of Microsoft strategy was to drive up the price and then let some greater fool walk in.
On the other hand, perhaps Oracle has a lot of infrastructure from their mostly failed clo
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tbh I think we'd do well to associate social media with drug addictions. i can't think that having each and every day of so many people to be driven by their tiktok/tweet/facebook/you-name-it where the goal is to have "more attention" is good - "yet here we are"
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Well, Oracle buying TikTok sounds like a good thing. Selling to Oracle is the most efficient way to kill a product.
And they'll do it by requiring every division/VP to hit profit targets. Social media companies give it away to gain market share so they can sell advertising, or sell user data. When Oracle management gets a look at the books and sees how many divisions are losing money they'll have a collective shit fit and order middle management to "fix" the "problem".
Oracle is worse for us (Score:5, Interesting)
Oracle would be worse than China. No exaggeration.
What, you don't believe me? Watch this interview with the CEO of Oracle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
China despite it's bad intentions can do less damage than Oracle. This is like jumping from the frying pan into the fire. Just because we're hiding from a tiger doesn't mean we're safe in a snake pit.
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This is like jumping from the frying pan into the fire. Just because we're hiding from a tiger doesn't mean we're safe in a snake pit.
I'm sorry, I do not understand. Can you do this as a car analogy, please?
Re:Oracle is worse for us (Score:5, Funny)
This is like getting out of an Uber driven by an emo SJW and getting in a stunt car driven by Kurt Russell.
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This is like getting out of an Uber driven by an emo SJW and getting in a stunt car driven by Kurt Russell.
How do I get on the list for a ride with Kurt?
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
I thought he'd be taller... (Score:2)
Also, I heard he was dead
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Ride the tiger. You can see his stripes but you know he's clean.
Oh, don't you see what I mean?
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Re:Oracle is worse for us (Score:4, Funny)
They say in the industry that Oracle is an abbreviation from One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison. Knowing Larry's public persona I would not be surprised if this was ture.
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Maybe.
I'm convinced Oracle will kill the product like they do with everything else.
I somehow can't see their corporate sales lawyer death squads convincing a bunch of teenagers to spend millions on it.
Re: Oracle is worse for us (Score:2)
Re: Oracle is worse for us (Score:2)
You are an idiot. You and 4 imbeciles that modded you up
Why would Oracle want it? (Score:4, Insightful)
They no longer have Oracle Open Office so no way of getting people to purchase subscriptions to that.
It does not add anything to Java.
I guess they could move it over to Oracle Cloud and hope people start thinking Oracle Cloud is a way to extend TikTok.
So what am I missing?
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I don't think you should be looking for consumer synergies: in social media, end users are the product, not the customers. I guess they want to expand from selling databases to selling data as well. Or maybe they don't have any plans for it and they expect to profit from it in some other way, by getting favors from Trump or by reselling it later.
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Politics (Score:5, Interesting)
Any time young people start to organize politically you'll find the right wing there to stop it. It happened with Occupy Wall Street, it's happening in the Universities (where the Koch brothers have been quietly filling the economics departments with their people by handing out big grants) and now it's happening with Tik Tok.
It's basically the modern day equivalent of Nixon's Drug War [youtu.be].
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It's just a silly statement overall. Youth tends to be very socialist / left leaning, and then often shifts politically to the right as it ages. Take a look at the hippie generation, as an example of just that, a generation that makes and current protests look like a joke in comparison.
Kids today don't even remotely protest compared to the hippies.
Yet like every single other generation, kids today will be more right-wing as they age. It doesn't mean they'll become republican, but as a group, they'll stop protesting, etc. All kids are rebellious, all rebel against 'elders', until they hit 30 or so. It's just normal, and how 'the human animal' works.
My point is, there's nothing to "stop", and no one is working against this latest generation, and their current "made-up problems" protest.
I think it's more that (at least recently) each younger generation sees flaws with the previous generation, fights hard to fix those flaws and shape society to match their vision. This new version of society works well for them (or they are at least comfortable with it), which leads to them being blind to new flaws or unable to see how it doesn't work for other people. So the new generation comes along and it's rinse, repeat. They do see the flaws and want to fix them, while the older generation -who are
It's not that the kids protest less (Score:2)
The right wing learned and adapted their tactics after the 60s and 70s. the Left wing is trying to, but we're bad at it.
Re: Politics (Score:3)
Trump Real Issue with tiktok? (Score:1, Interesting)
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Impeachment does not imply guilt, by definition. So this is to be expected. You may want to read up on impeachment here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
hmmmm (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:hmmmm (Score:4)
Trump didn't start this whole BS out of concern for national security.
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read somewhere... (Score:4, Informative)
Any "offer to buy" by a large US company might just be the CEO chuckling while typing a 1-liner email to the current admin that says "yea suuuuuuuurreee we're interested in TikTok lol".
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TikTok being banned or even destroyed might be just what the Chinese government wants. It would be just the excuse they need to do the same to US companies without looking like they are descending to Trump's level. Just like the EU - they were not going to move first but as soon as Trump's tariffs came in the EU was happy to slap some on American products.
They have been hinting that Apple will be the target. Booted out of China at the very least.
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+1
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China doesn't really don't have much ability to reach beyond their borders. Just about the only thing else they could do would be to make it hard for Apple to manufacture in China. Well, Apple is already looking into other places to move. It just takes years.
"The great separation" between China and the US and other western countries appears
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Regardless of where the phones are assembled Apple relies on supply chains in China.
China has reach far beyond its borders. The new silk road, infrastructure projects the world over, the ability to apply pressure on supply chains, the flow of investment capital etc.
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"It would cost Apple about 17% of their business"
Does that account for their production facilities being given the boot as well? That would take Apple years to recover if China gave them 30 days to pack up and hit the road. It'd cost China a fraction of GDP, but Apple would be devastated. Apple's biggest hope against that would be that such an action would scare other companies manufacturing in China. Still, people make irrational decisions that cost $billions all the time
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Person A: I'll give you $1500 for that car. (Offer is made, A will be bound to it if accepted
Tik Tok (Score:2)
over fast (Score:2)
Tiktok is certainly done for now. Larry doesn't know anything about free to use.
WeChat User Here (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't mean anyone planned the accomplishment. I first saw video sharing when I arrived in China in 2014 and saw with what snappy ease young people were capturing a moment and giving it frame and commentary. What I do mean is for all of Google's vaunted history of its early-on in-house orgies and pinball machines, real effort from a competitor has consequences. For all the advantage of pioneering the "real estate" of a screen, beginning with cornered navigation, UI design has been a wasteland of 20-somethings believing everyone's eyesight is like theirs and that moving anything into the center of the screen is paramount to burning a client at the stake.
Navigation went to hell and a hand-basket prior to 2000 when AOL was over-selling clicks and this is hardly different. Yo, America's on fire, literally and analogically...peace.
National security risk of an app. (Score:2)
Used mostly by kids. Is this just a reflection of the children working in the government that they can't stop TikToking on their hardened phones that handle top secret classified data?
Or maybe Trump can ban malware next.
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Excellent news (Score:2)
new protectionism (Score:2)
Now that's an interesting play there.
I wonder when leaders in Europe will follow suit and force Google, Facebook, Microsoft and - irony - Oracle to sell their european operations to a european company...
(cue the typical moron "they should just pull out of Europe" answers... 3... 2... 1...)
Goodbye Capitalism, Hello Facist Economics (Score:2)
That was of course until Facebook became big enough to start buying new networks like Instagram, and with Net Neutrality now gone, it's impossible to even create the next instagram here in the United States without the Telcos metering your success.
So of course innovation is going to come from overseas, but now we have this new ceiling that if you're more popular than Facebook, a 16 years old website, you MUST sell your business to an American Comp
Bye bye TikTok (Score:2)
Oracle buying TikTok (or becoming a "technology partner", whatever that means) will be the death of TikTok in the US. Oracle is where technology goes to die. Oracle has not had a completely successful acquisition of any outside technology EVER.
The end result will be bad for people in the US, turning us into a cultural backwater. I'm not a fan of TikTok (written words are my natural medium, not audio or video) but a lot of people are, and people in the US will be cut off from things that are being created el