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Comment by muststopmyths | Hacker News Reader

Wait, so I'm going to have to install the TikTok For Business with Sharepoint integration in my Teams?

I guess anything makes sense to a company that paid $26 billion USD for LinkedIn.

Jokes aside, it probably would be a nice addition to their consumer-oriented portfolio (i.e. xbox, minecraft, etc), if they're planning to stay relevant in the FAANG-taking-over-the-world state of reality these days.

Steve Jobs once said about Microsoft that their only problem is that they have no taste. And it's decisions like this that illustrate what he meant. TikTok is such a clash with everything Microsoft stands for as a company (if there is such a thing). It makes no sense.

It's still a $1T+ company, that's the metric that matters when evaluating the "worth" of a business. So in that sense, the market has a "taste" for Microsoft.

Honestly I don't give a flying fuck about a company's market cap, I care about what it offers to me and the world.

Markets are a means to an end, not something to fetishize.

Market cap is actually a quite precise estimation of what company offers to the world.

Money is just information about usefulness. If you are useful to other people you've got money. If someone is useful to you, you give money.

Exactly. Unfortunately we humans have a tendency to believe that we can understand what's useful for the rest of the people better than themselves.

So parenting isn't useful and children should pay their parents? - Just to show that there are other factors at play as well and not all can be measured in money.

To go back to the Microsoft case: They played the market well, that there are no alternatives in some areas and a new owner has hardly a chance to go there.

> So parenting isn't useful and children should pay their parents?

They should, most cultures express it in the form of an expectation that children take care of their parents in their old age.

Like Theranos?

Unfortunately price is the information. It is actually a better indicator of quality than many other attributes. Not a perfect one but better.

That’s absolutely amazingly on the mark.

at this point its almost 'on brand' for microsoft to buy it

I agree with you if looking at this from a historical perspective. However, l can see this working out for MS if TikTok remains a wholly owned, but independently operated subsidiary. If they buy it and largely 'leave it alone' to continue with its own leadership team and operational independence (as it seems github has been allowed to), I can see it being a net gain for MS and TikTok. The integration plan would make or break this (rumored) acquisition.

I think he meant MS didn’t understand that design was opinionated and that some design opinions were better than others.

The content-moderation headaches of a social network alone should be enough to scare anyone away. I can't imagine this actually being a serious story, but that could be my lack of imagnination.

> to their consumer-oriented portfolio (i.e. xbox, minecraft, etc)

Yeah. Symbian, Meego,..

Maybe they're relaunching their Sidekick phones!

Microsoft is more relevant than a few companies in the FAANG list.

>I guess anything makes sense to a company that paid $26 billion USD for LinkedIn.

Is there data to support that this was overvalued? Not personally a big fan of LinkedIn, but it seemed like probably a good long-term buy for Microsoft.

I don't know, tbh. But to my understanding, it was not profitable before the acquisition. It does generate ~5 billion dollars in revenue now, but Microsoft won't tell you how much of that is profit.

Even if I charitably apportion 1B profit (which I bet Microsoft would trumpet if that was a thing), that's 20+ years to make the 26B back.

My bigger problem with LinkedIn is that it's a cesspool of recruiter spam.

Lynda.com was the only worthwhile part of it, and I wonder if that's still around/popular.

I'm also bitter about them calling Windows Phone too expensive to keep going at around the same time, so I might be a bit biased :-)

Dang, I loved the Windows Phone shell. Aesthetically, one of the best things MS has ever done.

>I don't know, tbh. But to my understanding, it was not profitable before the acquisition. It does generate ~5 billion dollars in revenue now, but Microsoft won't tell you how much of that is profit.

Isn't a valuation at ~5 years revenue pretty standard for a business acquisition?

You're not taking into account any of the strategic value to Microsoft. Like how they can integrate LI Sales Navigator into Dynamics to compete with Salesforce, etc.

Lynda.com was rebranded as "LinkedIn Learning" and is still around. My employer has access for all employees and I've taken a few good courses on there.

Teams for Kids Pro Pass Plus

That'll be "TikTok for Business 365 Professional Edition" for you, sir.

We'll gonna have tiktok based video portfolio for interview.

You do know that LinkedIn is doing somewhere near $10 billion of revenue a year, right?

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