Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO, while speaking at the Code Conference on Monday said that the Microsoft’s failed attempt to take over TikTok’s US operation last year was one of the strangest things he has ever worked on. Way back in 2020, in the month of August, American corporation Microsoft proposed acquiring some portion of TikTok in a complicated deal in which the Trump administration threated to come down heavily on the social networking platform TikTok. But things went differently, 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, according to Microsoft officials.
“First of all, you’ve got to remember, TikTok came to us, we didn’t go to TikTok,” Nadella said at the Code Conference in Beverly Hills, California. “TikTok was caught in between a lot of issues that they were having across two capitals, and they wanted to partner,” Nadella said on Monday.
Nadella thought TikTok might have been a good fit because it was a social, cloud-based service that heavily leveraged AI, all areas of focus for the company. “It is an interesting product,” he says. On being asked that if TikTok comes to Microsoft now, will he be interested in buying it, Nadella said “NO” and said that at this point, I’m happy with what I have.” He also went on to add that says he is not following up on what’s going on with TikTok and Oracle.
Nadella’s contention is that Microsoft would have been an interesting partner for TikTok because of its established work with “investments in social media, in particular what we’re doing in content moderation and child safety.” Those strengths — plus the key fact that it is a US-based cloud services provider — were seen to be key to assuaging the Trump administration.
“There was a period of time when I though the the [US government] had a particualr set of requirements, [but] it just disappeared,” Nadella says. “President Trump I think had a particular point of view of what he was trying to get done …and then just dropped off.”
With Biden being at the helm of America, the executive order promulgated by Trump was finally revoked by Biden. As of now, TikTok’s US operation never got sold. Nadella showed his interest in buying TikTok by uttering the statement again and again which reads, “Tiktok is an interesting product.”
ByteDance, the owner of popular short-video app TikTok, had about 1.9 billion monthly active users across all its platforms as of December 2020, according to the memo. The company also runs viral apps such as Douyin, the domestic Chinese equivalent of TikTok, and a news aggregation app called Jinri Toutiao.In 2020, the company’s revenue last year doubled to $34.3 billion.
In the past, many countries have raised concerns regarding the content of TikTok which is thought to be obscene, immoral, vulgar and encouraging of pornography. Acting in this direction countries like India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Indonesia imposed temporary blocks and issued warnings to one of the hottest startups of the world.
Recently, TikTok is joined the 1 billion user club, with the ByteDance-owned video platform reported that it now officially has as many active monthly users. This is a big feat, considering the fact that TikTok has only been around for the last three years. Instagram, by comparison, launched in 2010 and is also reported to have around 1 billion active monthly users, while Facebook, which launched in 2004, boasts around 2.89 billion.
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