Walmart joins Microsoft bid for TikTok US

ft.com

2 pointsrich_sasha2 comments

Why is suddenly everyone so keen to buy TikTok? And why such bizarre buyers - Microsoft, Oracle, now Walmart? None of these are companies I would associate with a social media presence. Their business is generally the "boring" - office application, data munging, groceries.

Microsoft did buy LinkedIn and Skype, they don't seem in any way integrated in what it does (in fact, doesn't Microsoft undercut its own Skype app with Microsoft Teams?). And, this is opinion-based, but from a technical point of view, they seem very inferior to comparable non-Microsoft products (Zoom, Facebook etc.).

Walmart desperately wants to catch up and be part of the tech sector though after working for them part-time I can safely say, from watching their self-driving cleaning robot glitch out, to their inventory scanning robot that's sitting idle in the corner near the restrooms that they have a ways to go.

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