
Trump's favorite tech company could win TikTok - theBashShell
https://www.axios.com/how-trumps-favorite-tech-company-could-win-tiktok-7a42b950-e0a5-446d-b49e-21edd083d116.html
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AdmiralAsshat
I can't think of a faster way to kill a trendy app's popularity than getting
bought by Oracle.

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Macha
At least the user base for this app's reaction will be "Who?" rather than the
more appropriate "We should leave. Now."

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judge2020
They'd probably keep the majority of users by leading with "from the company
who brought you Minecraft's Java"

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dopamean
It would be hilarious and speak to the dysfunction of every part of this
situation if Oracle ended up owning tiktok.

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eldavido
It really isn't hilarious. This is how the US loses its long-term reputation
as a level playing field for business, a great place to work/set up shop, etc.

This whole process has been unbelievable. The president dusts off some obscure
law to ban or block tiktok. Now a forced sale is about to happen and the
administration gets a say in who buys it? And they want some kind of finder's
fees!?

This stuff isn't supposed to happen in the US! We aren't Zimbabwe, with a
dictator who runs around with suitcases full of cash making no compunction
about awarding contracts to people closest to him! This is major, high-level
corruption! Are we going to start judging other M&A deals by who donates the
most to a campaign?

This whole thing is just a huge, stinking, disorderly mess. We can't decide
whether we're going to ban Huawei or not. Then the whole mess with ZTE. Now
Tiktok. It's capricious and corrosive to the rule of law. And what's worse,
not only is it ham-fisted, but this administration makes such a big deal out
of "freedom", when having a president stepping in like this is anything BUT
freedom -- it is the very antithesis of it, where winners and losers are
decided based on personal favorites?

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bassman9000
_This is major, high-level corruption!_

It's not. The CCP is not playing by the rules. It's not a recent thing. It's
been going on for ages. Stop defending CCP companies. We're not talking about
EU, Japan, Indian, Australian, etc. companies. Stop conflating this with _lack
of freedom_.

If you want to be mad at someone, be mad at the CCP and their absolute disdain
for the rules by which everyone is playing.

 _We can 't decide whether we're going to ban Huawei or not._

Of course we can. It's another CCP tool. We ban it. That's it.

 _This whole thing is just a huge, stinking, disorderly mess._

Only because you chose to make everything related to Trump _a mess_. Remove
Trump from the equation, judge those companies for what they are: the leading
edge in CCP cyberwarfare and espionage,

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fomine3
> Of course we can. It's another CCP tool. We ban it. That's it.

This is how to conflict quickly.

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bassman9000
We are at conflict already. It's not standard engagement. It's not even Cold
War engagement (yet). But there's definitely a war being fought in some
fronts. Propaganda and economy, among others. And Huawei/ZTE/TikTok are the
tip of the spear.

We may as wait for another 40 years till the CCP is prepared enough so no one
can stop them.

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kryptiskt
I don't know what Oracle is thinking, I mean, aside from everything else.
Buying a consumer-oriented company would run counter to all their strategy for
the past 40 years, I don't know how they can feel confident in their ability
to manage such a business.

Well, it could be one way to get a big customer onto Oracle Cloud.

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numair
Everyone who doesn’t understand why this makes a ton of sense for Oracle, and
why they should fight to win the deal, has clearly never heard of Datalogix.
(The fact that nobody discusses this point in the tech press shows just how
terrible they are at doing their jobs, but I digress.)

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hilbertseries
Given that Oracle has never run a large b2c application before and its
lifeblood is enterprise b2b, I don't see how this synergy is even worth
mentioning. Obviously there's a lot of money to be made in an application like
tikok, the question is if you can run it and maintain it's brand successfully.
Anyone familiar with Oracle is going to question that and that's what the
journalism is going to reflect. A synergy with a data collection company (a
b2b company they bought), isn't particularly worth mentioning.

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0xcafecafe
The question then is will Oracle kill TikTok like Solaris?

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noja
Why does this make sense for Oracle?

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mmastrac
The TikTok/Trump battle has been great for schadenfreude lovers. Adding Oracle
and Larry Ellison into the mix makes for three players that I'm happy to see
in this battle of dysfunction, losing money.

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nightski
As much as I dislike Trump, I hate polarizing headlines that have no evidence
in the article to back it up. They merely say that the administration _could_
have power over the choice of acquirer through CFIUS. That Ellison is a donor
to the Trump campaign so theoretically that could make Trump like them. But
it's all hypothetical and not backed in evidence.

This is the type of journalism that is killing trust in professional news
organizations today. It's exhausting and I am sick of it.

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convery
Indeed, whenever a headline contains "Trump" and "could"; I just automatically
tune out. Same as for headlines ending with a "?", you know that it'll be
speculation that is unlikely to be true or relevant in any way.

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thedudemabry
Spectacle is not the only motive for journalism like this. Speculation about
presidential conflicts of interest is valuable and relevant to national
discourse because the public's reaction to their existence directly impacts
their power.

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nightski
That's great if it is presented as speculation. But with clickbait headlines
and initial paragraphs that make it sound like fact and that direct evidence
is found is just bad reporting.

