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Comment by nothis | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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

That’s absolutely amazingly on the mark.

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

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