Oracle hosting TikTok US data. '25,000' moderators hired. Code reviews. Trump getting his cut... It's the season finale In a business dance oddly reminiscent of reality TV twists and turns, it appears an offer by Oracle to handle TikTok in the US may have tipped the scales and tentatively gained White House approval. For several weeks, speculation has been rife over who would win the TikTok challenge, with one contender after another dropping …
Unless they genuinely ‘lost’ the biggest belly-ache is that Microsoft stared down Oracle and made them over-bid for this piece of arse.
Microsoft shareholders must be praying to the Gods they did not spaff a HP/Autonomy with tens of $bn’s.
IMHO Tik-Tok will prove worthless... and a huge distraction to Oracle’s strategic aims. ... unless they have years of Oracle Cloud computing time they need to desperately shift.
"If you wrote a fictional book with these sorts of goings on 10 years ago you'd be told it was unbelievable."
I think that people would get confused and return the books. The current system makes no sense, but not because it's unbelievable, just because I have no clue what is happening. The premise I understand: the current American administration likes having bargaining chips and is making up pretenses to get them. The rest is totally unclear. What exactly Oracle is doing: I don't know. What ByteDance is doing: I don't know either. What the president thinks: don't know. What the executive departments are doing when they don't know what the president thinks, what the president is going to use to make his final decision when we know he won't be reading the bureaucratic report, who is fighting ByteDance's lawsuit and how, what happened to the deadline of Tuesday which didn't get met, what members of the president's party are willing to put up with, what the members of that party actually think, whether anyone else is going to interfere, I don't know any of this. At least when other political events are happening I can understand enough of what people think and plan to do that I can marvel at the audacity or hypocrisy. With this, I can only sit there and puzzle through how anyone can make plans when there's little or no information from anybody.
You seem to imply the members of the president's party think.
OK, maybe about the brown envelopes...
And Trump's statement sounds a lot like blackmail. At least he says the money will go to the government - maybe (ok, surely) in addition to a healthy check to the campaign by Larry.
President wants to look tough on Jina
Advisers point out that turning off the favorite cat video habit of 100M addicts just before the election might not make him look like Santa Claus
China was going to block the sale anyway, Oracle could't afford it and would fsck it up
So Larry donates a few $M to the Don, gets a few $100M contract to run some servers for TikTok and suddenly security is not a problem
It's just like the deals for restaurant services in New York by certain Italian-American family businesses
President does not like China - no Trump Hotel deals :(
President punishes China with trade.
China hates President, loves TikTok.
President fears TikTok will make him look bad
Oracle loves President and money
TikTok pays Oracle to manage US content
Oracle makes President look "good".
Happy ending :(
"I said I want a cut of the money to the US government because we made the deal possible."
This means:
Trump said Trump wants a cut of the money to the US government because Trump & friends made the deal possible.
And it's been in the news lately that his campaign has been hemorrhaging money.
Hopefully that makes it a bit clearer what he wants out of this.
"Although for the most part companies that pay for “targeted” ads are the ones being conned."
Completely agree; we all run ad-blockers, everyone hates ads on webpages. I think there are three reasons than people in 'digital' marketing continue to push forward with this losing strategy:
1. They're all stupid. Have you every met anyone in 'digital' smarter than a sea cucumber? Exactly.
2. They're all herd animals; too unimaginative to think of anything even slightly better.
3. The slightly smarter ones realise they'll be out of a job if anyone finds out how pointless they are.
exactly this, 'Big Data' is as dumb as a bag of bricks. I use an ad blocker, and the few places I don't use it, when I see ads, it's for stuff I've looked at online, sure, but it's not demonstrating any insight or understanding, if 'Big Data' understood me it would show me adverts for dodgy rock music and army surplus, not whatever gadget I last looked at on Bangood.
Oracle has a sizable ad analytics platform FWIW.
https://www.oracle.com/data-cloud/solutions.html
C.
Cloud is the future for tech growth. This holds your applications and data to ransom if you don't continue to pay for hosting. No more of the "buy a licensed copy of software and run it into the ground for the next 10 years, aka sweating thew assets". So to maintain growth and impress investors (growth and shareholder returns are more important than customer, product and other such frivolities after all).
So Cloud is dominated by Google, Microsoft and Amazon. Oracle needs to be seen as a tier 1 cloud suppliers to keep it's business afloat, hence anything that Oracle has that connects to the internet once in a while is counted as cloud revenue. Now they need big companies choosing Oracle Cloud over the three main players. They don't necessarily need to make money out of them, they need the publicity out of it, Oracle know how to extract the money at a later date with subtle licencing changes and unannounced audits.
For Oracle they win a big cloud contract, they become 'super hip' by having some part of a contemporary youth phenomenon that includes both likes and shares and they can think about data mining the hell out of it if they want to really impress wall street - somehow AI and ML (yes, not one but both) will be mentioned at some point to really ice the cake (everyone lost interest in Big Data way to soon).
Oh an Trump, well he needs to fall back on his Straight Talking, No Compromise, Super Smart Businessman persona that he makes deals happen and they are in the interests of the US people for a small event in November. The issue is the US population is too smart to fall for that a second time.
Joe Biden is not-Trump
That's it. His platform is "getting things back to normal" (i.e. the same corporation and lobbyist controlled governments we have had previously)
Biden has said he would veto any Medicare-for-all proposals that came to him, despite 69% of Americans (even 46% of Republicans) wanting it.
You think not?
The SCCs have been sunk as a means of stopping the Privacy Figleaf from shrivelling completely. With that and the playbook already written it's the next obvious step for the EU. Apart from that, India seems keen on having its own offerings. And, of course, China.
I suppose for the UK trying to pull such a deal would get in they way of the much sought after trade deal although touting the UK as the best place in the world to run such a service might appeal to BoJo.
The most important detail is missing from this report.
Will TikTok users still be allowed to be mean to little Donnie?
Let's face it, this is what this is all about. Trump hadn't heard of TikTok until it helped messing up one of his rallies. He did not care if it was spying on its users. He gives not a jot about security concerns. But it made him look silly, and Trump never forgets when someone hurts his delicate ego.
Yes! It is painfully obvious this is what it was all about. The net is strewn with silly platforms for teenagers, but only this one caught Trump's ire because of the fake rally attender stunt some of its users organized. Can't go after them, so go after the platform, and make an example of it.
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