The United States' brand is that we are an open, dynamic, stable place to do business in. If you have capital its safe here because of our respect of the rule of law, and private property rights. We should strive to be the best place on earth to do business in. We are an open country and we benefit from being open. We benefit from competition. We are literally richer by definition - when business like TikTok choose to operate in the United States.<p>The decision to force transfer of business undermines our country's brand and our reputation. It's sad that Twitter is participating in this shake down.<p>I posted this in another thread and colorfully illustrates that Twitter is no better than what they accuse TikTok of being.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24095334" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24095334</a>
It's worth constantly re-iterating that Vine [1] was shutdown by Twitter in 2017 back when Twitter was losing a lot of cash. It was available for any tech company to purchase for pennies on the dollar and was losing $10 million/month to run [2].<p>Vine was very popular and a lot of people were very disappointed when it was shutdown. It predated TikTok and Musical.ly and certainly had the vast majority of users for short looping videos before it shutdown. Previously users have suggested Vine used a follow/subscribe-model and was not algorithmic like TikTok, but adding a news feed algorithm to keep up with a competitor would not have been that hard.<p>It's been reported Microsoft is looking at buying TikTok with some investors valuing the company at $30-$70 billion. [3] That number is high in the context of this latest WSJ article, which says Twitter has $7.8 billion in cash and a market cap of $29 billion.<p>However, TikTok reportedly earned $5.6 billion in revenue in Q1 2020 [4], and reportedly made a $3 billion net profit in 2019 [5]. It those numbers are correct then TikTok (which often called a Vine clone, and Vine 2.0) has grown bigger than Twitter itself.<p>This leapfrog happened in an era of cash-rich Silicon Valley software companies, where investment funding is easily obtainable.<p>It's worth reflecting deeply on this turn of events, and why Vine was allowed to wither and die, only for a better executed clone immediately take over and dominate.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vine_(service)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vine_(service)</a><p>[2] <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/07/revive-vine" rel="nofollow">https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/07/revive-vine</a><p>[3] <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/microsoft-aims-for-a-deal-to-buy-tiktoks-u-s-business-11596418842" rel="nofollow">https://www.wsj.com/articles/microsoft-aims-for-a-deal-to-bu...</a><p>[4] <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-bytedance-results-idUSKBN23O114" rel="nofollow">https://www.reuters.com/article/us-bytedance-results-idUSKBN...</a><p>[5] <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/27/tiktok-bytedance-profit.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/27/tiktok-bytedance-profit.html</a>
I don’t get how twitter and msft could buy just the US operations of a company like tiktok... like do the developers and PMs still work in China and then twitter just helps maintain the servers. Or does the app diverge into 2 apps at that point with 2 separate dev teams?
How does this help the problem of ~3 companies dominating social media in the US? Congress just derided Facebook's ability to acquire Instagram in a public hearing a week ago, and now this feels like a similar play. It's a shame that TikTok has the baggage of being funded by China, because otherwise they created a great app that's so far been able to rapidly rise and compete against the incumbents. We need more of that.