Oracle Wins Bid for TikTok in U.S.
wsj.com
wsj.com
- Bytedance retains some ownership and control of the app and the algorithms
- Oracle runs the entire back end on their infrastructure
- Oracle guarantees to the US government that no data is going back to China (because they control the release of the app and control the back end)
- This satisfies the USA's (supposed) national security concerns and also satisfies China because TikTok is not actually being "sold" to a US company.
Otherwise the guarantee that no data is being sent to China is not airtight. Oracle could audit the app every time it gets an update and watch network traffic, but this would miss anything sent by code activated remotely after the fact. It wouldn't work for long, but the US government will look for any reason to deny this deal. I don't think Oracle will audit the app constantly anyway. Come to think of it, that could apply to the source code too, if the malicious code was extremely well hidden.
Also they will probably take over responsibility for the Play and App Store accounts and be responsible for pushing the new versions (after audit).
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/tiktok-agreed-to-buy...
If it's one of a dozen places you advertise, that's fine. If you're trying to run a business where it's a core platform, you quickly run into the limits there.
Plenty of companies store their users’ data in the US, but user profiles and content made public is visible from anywhere in the world.
Oracle is a greedy leech on the world and tech in general. Tiktok has something they want to use to sue other companies. Oracle knows almost no other way to do business.
There is literally no reason to think this could possibly happen, apart from “Oracle is bad and they do bad IP lawsuits”. Tik Tok doesn’t have any novel IP that could support a theory like this, and Oracle isn’t even getting any IP in this deal.
And I would think the magic algorithm that comes along with Tiktok is IP.
Maybe you know the list of patents Bytedances holds? If they do not have IP around that algorithm they are idiots.
Anyway it will be interesting to watch.
So I don't think this is a great step forward for US consumers.
https://www.rd.com/article/the-dangers-of-tiktok-that-are-wo...
This is the real risk.
It suggests that Oracle's cloud business has such dire traction that they can't acquire prominent customers for it any other way than to directly buy part of them. It also speaks to that Ellison & Co. view the cloud shift as a terminal threat for Oracle, one that is getting worse by the day, and that if they don't succeed at building up their cloud business, they will erode and die (and they're right).
Oracle stayed in the game in the last round through massive consolidation, buying up the competition one after another (eg Siebel, PeopleSoft, etc). They'll try the same thing this time around as their organic efforts have largely failed; we'll see how much success they have given they're far outgunned this time around (and running from much further behind).
In other words it's the same as every cloud provider: They hope you'll build a business system that uses enough of their proprietary tech that you can't easily move to another provider.
The autonomous database is Oracle's offering of their Oracle database - that requires no DBA or tuning and runs on Exadata infrastructure. They are offering it for free - because they want enterprises using existing on-premise Oracle databases, to move their existing DB applications to the cloud.
Oracle Autonomous databases comes with free Oracle APEX - which is a low code / no code toolchain.
Does the ceo/founder have family in china that can be held hostage?
It’s no wonder that Silicon Valley is uninterested in defending it, despite the fact that this sort of deal is likely to severely fracture how tech services are treated by governments in the future.
He wants one to score with the voters. Given the unusual nature of the ask , it could be a donation to the project of his choicing like the wall
It really is not. One of the biggest horrors of the Trump years is the extent to which this kind of capricious executive action has been normalized. A ban is a ban. If you genuinely think an app poses a security risk, then you use one of the executive tools available to shut it down.
There was no "ban" enacted here. It was a bargaining chip used to muck with the markets in an outrageously explicit way. We don't do that in this country. Or we never did before.
The closest equivalent to this in terms of effect would have been the trust busting of the early 20th century. And that involved all three branches of government working over years. This happened because One Guy decided he didn't like TikTok.
This is the correct question to ask, but the answer is quite simple - because Donald Trump is corrupt and thinks he can get away with it.
You had a republic, can you keep it?
'ByteDance let us know today they would not be selling TikTok’s US operations to Microsoft.' [0]
[0] https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2020/09/13/microsoft-statem...
Wasn’t tiktok just running a huge campaign about how all the work is done in the US, it just happens to be hq-ed in China?
It's not true for ByteDance though, which appears to be where the algorithms came from.
Skype was not sponsored by a foreign power but by liberal minded founders using P2P technology. Still a "national security" threat (actually a hegemony threat) so it had to be addressed somehow. Microsoft was happy to help.
It also helps explain a little the hapless treatment of the Skype brand under Microsoft. Not that Microsoft hasn't bought companies and mismanaged the assets before, but they really didn't know what to do with Skype.
See: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/13/technology/tiktok-microso...
> The Chinese regulations helped scuttle the effort by Microsoft, which said the only way it could both protect the privacy of TikTok users in the United States and prevent Beijing from using the app as a venue for disinformation was to take over the computer source code underlying the app, and the algorithms that determine what videos are seen by the 100 million Americans who use it each month.
This makes it clear that China has ties to Oracle management in some form or another, or Oracle wouldn't be the last man standing. This is going to be a shitshow.
Oracle also has ties to Trump. This stinks.
Still, I’m not saying that the $10B DoD contract and the way they tortured the process to avoid giving it to Amazon did not stink as well. Or that Amazon as a company is fine. There can be more than one festering carcass in a swamp.
Me thinks this was all a massive gambit to win the JEDI deal, hobble Oracle with a turd, and then pull out.
Isn’t this virtually identical to the Chinese model? For example, NetEase is the tech partner for Blizzard, GCBD for Apple’s iCloud, Sinnet for AWS, who does Microsoft partner with?
This appears to be a working model that the Chinese government will support. I wonder if other nations will start to adopt it.
My Chinese friends are joking on this "California on Cloud" scenario. (GCBD is called "Guizhou on Cloud" in Chinese)
Edit: They're probably being technically correct about "sell", but not so much about "operations".
https://twitter.com/globaltimesnews/status/13054102792833884...
Oracle purchasing a stake in ByteDance, and maybe handling US operations? It sounds like one of those deals which will end up as a loss in a few years and a write-down. The first comparison that comes to mind is the Tumblr sale, when Yahoo wrote-down $712 million, although the companies are quite different. However, the similarity is the culture difference between the parent and subsidiary companies - Yahoo couldn't figure out how to turn Tumblr profitable as they had no successful examples prior, as far as I remember. Oracle and TikTok could not be more different: Oracle is a cold cloud technology supplier with no business advertising to teens.
If Oracle wishes to only be the cloud partner holding US data (a possibility mentioned in the article) it's possible that it could work out, but whether it is possible is dependent on politics and potentially who is elected as the next President.
"You actually don't need to be open-minded about Oracle, you are wasting the openness of your mind [...] As you know people, as you learn about things, you realize that these generalizations we have are, virtually to a generalization, false. Well, except for this one, as it turns out. What you think of Oracle, is even truer than you think it is. There has been no entity in human history with less complexity or nuance to it than Oracle."
- Bryan Cantrill, https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=2046
Oracle is where things go to die.
RIP TikTok.
Any source for this? I wasn't aware that third party stores are used by the general population as commonly as the play store anywhere.
Another thing is that with such bans, all major ISPs and network carriers are instructed to block the traffic to the related domains, so the app won't work anyway unless they roll out with a lot of changes.
I thought the idea of Microsoft buying TikTok was funny, but I couldn't think of a company more effective to dismantle TikTok than Oracle.
You're not wrong - it is a little funny.
But on the other hand, they have been running LinkedIn (and Github!) pretty successfully, so it's not that ridiculous.
Ah, but therein lies the genius of the purchase.
In 40 years, the current TikTok userbase will be technology-hating, risk-adverse VPs -- a prime Oracle demographic.
They're just getting in early.
Minus the avoidable password breaches
I guess I'll be polishing my resume.
They paid for an apartment and car as well!
It’s a great place to be, actually.
Sadly it was looking out over the West side of Chicago from the West side of the loop, so the view was mediocre even when the weather played nice.
One of the nice things about this pandemic has been how silent my office is. So much easier to keep my head down and churn code / solutions to problems out.
Oracle has one of the last couple of proper industrial research labs left in the industry.
It regularly publishes at the top venues in multiple fields and funds a lot of academics.
2018: https://sigmod2018.org/sigmod_industrial_list.shtml
RAPID: In-Memory Analytical Query Processing Engine with Extreme Performance per Watt
2020: https://sigmod2020.org/sigmod_industrial_list.shtml
Database Workload Capacity Planning using Time Series Analysis and Machine Learning
Less sarcastically, I’d like to see some examples of this as I have a genuine interest in the topic.
I'd say they are doing a mediocre job on the whole. But I may just be bitter over recent bugs like renaming a table crashing the server.
Any ideas why?
Today..not worth the price tag. And if you do pay the price tag, you're going to need some high priced DBAs to baby it along.
To your list I would add that with Hudson they achieved such an own-goal that all anyone knows is the renamed fork, Jenkins. (Which I believe was named after Leeroy Jenkins...)
Agreed. Having worked with and delivered some great solutions with Oracle DB in the 2000's, I've been telling people since at least 2010, that Oracle used to be the answer to the question, "which enterprise database?", but now is the answer to "which is the one vendor I should avoid at all costs?"
IIRC, they wanted an English butler name[1] snooty enough to match "Hudson" - and Jenkins fit the bill (you can almost hear the British accent)
Nah. If it were any good then the license wouldn't prohibit you from benchmarking it.
Instead of a license, the SQLite source code offers a blessing:
May you do good and not evil May you find forgiveness for yourself and forgive others May you share freely, never taking more than you give.
Oracle software licenses are so opaque that there's almost no way to be compliant and that's by design.
So in essence: Either you pay more for your existing installation or buy some additional shit, which you don't need, or else.
The or else is the threat of a software audit, which is almost guaranteed to find you non-compliant and gives you 30 days to either pay up or get rid of every Oracle software component. Best of luck with that.
There are umpteen stories about this behavior on the web. For example this: [1].
Oracle's business model is not really technology, but a licensing racket for enterprise customers. Sort of
Nice company you have here, would be a shame if something happens to it
[1] https://www.netnetweb.com/content/blog/oracle-audits-will-ge...
edit : rephrased a sentence
Bytedance isn’t actually selling TikTok, and the White House gets its win.
Sun (the company), not Solaris (the OS). But yeah, Java has done relatively well.
Peoplesoft was pretty entrenched when Oracle bought it, and the state of other options in that field remains pretty grim.
Anybody remember PeopleSoft?
If Oracle has anything to do with the app itself or its functionality then TikTok will not do well. But if Oracle just manages the data and cloud operations then this may indeed work out well for both companies. Oracle is competent when it comes to data and cloud. That's their core business after all.
What an irony given Oracle's own roots in USA's espionage agencies.
“ByteDance started opening data centers in India and the US in 2019. This may be strictly for internal purposes, but its possible they plan to launch a cloud hosting service. ByteDance acquired Terark in 2019 which allows databases to run 200x faster by reading compressed data at 50% of the cost. If they launch an external service, the selling point could be faster processing and access to some of ByteDance’s AI tech.
A cloud service combined with enterprise software (and eventually a phone or other hardware) would take a page out of Microsoft’s approach of bundling multiple products and selling them top down through the C- Suite.”
https://turner.substack.com/p/the-rise-of-tiktok-and-underst...
Sure. The answer is that there is no such significant added value to Oracle, specifically, but TikTok itself will end up selling for bargain basement prices, meaning that added value isn't necessary for an acquisition to make sense.
Absolutely not. If anything, the young user base makes TikTok more valuable. It will be viewed as an analogue to Facebook before it exploded.
What was the most visible outcome of Microsoft's takeover of GitHub? Some software engineers who happen to live in a wrong peninsula in Europe had their GitHub accounts shutdown with no advance notice and no recourse. So much for the rule of law and for social coding!
I think it's great that people from all over the world have a choice of who to give their data to. If there'd be a worldwide antitrust body, US would already be in trouble! Remember when China blocked Twitter and whatever else? Yeah, aren't we the China now?!
It's insane when I tried installing oracle db and BI tools on my laptop. It was the worst software installation process in my life.
Further credibility with the US government as they deepen their ties with the NSA and US intelligence. Leads to winning more massive government contracts and more favor from future administrations.
Oracle is ahead of the game. It has realized that ingratiating itself with the government is a recipe for long-term success.
"If we can't have it, then we want to make sure NOONE will profit from it, and we burn that space to the ground in the US" ?
The cynic in me suspects that this is so, Oracle looked like a weird pick from the start. It would have been super interesting to be part of that negotiation.
> Microsoft earlier Sunday said it was notified earlier in the day of the decision by TikTok parent ByteDance Ltd.
> “We are confident our proposal would have been good for TikTok’s users, while protecting national security interests,” the company said in a statement. “To do this, we would have made significant changes to ensure the service met the highest standards for security, privacy, online safety, and combatting disinformation, and we made these principles clear in our August statement. We look forward to seeing how the service evolves in these important areas.”
Yeah, as a self-appointed member of the worldwide trade commission, enforcing the antitrust rules and regulations, I'm really happy that the Microsoft's bid has been declined!
You don't just pick the highest paying bid, necessarily
Sure, if you're the shareholder, you may not care what happens to your former employees, but the buyer should care that the value of the asset they just paid for is inclusive of human capital, and that value depends on the opinion of the people working on the seller's side
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-06/oracle-di...
This means that Oracle are legitimately the best people to answer the question of which half of your advertising was wasted for offline sales.
Weird, right?
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/09/oracle-one-of-do...
https://gist.githubusercontent.com/llacb47/2beb750b56bc98a5d...
?mod=djemalertNEWS
And how does it stop any bytedance engineer from logging into the cloud machine or looking into the data directly
Oracle's latest acquisition [0] by is a consumer video creation company called sauce.video [1]
It could be that Oracle is looking for a new challenge in video technology to demonstrate the capabilities of their cloud services, even Zoom chosen them for their infrastructure [2].
[0] https://www.oracle.com/corporate/acquisitions/
[1] https://www.oracle.com/corporate/acquisitions/sauce-video/
Seriously? There were plenty of legitimate reasons to hate Microsoft "back in the day". Less of them now, but hating Microsoft in the 90s and 00s was not "without reason".
Never said that, read what I said again.
(emphasis mine) Okay, what am I missing? That looks like exactly the same statement.
> Seriously? There were plenty of legitimate reasons to hate Microsoft "back in the day".
That validates the second half of the comparison as much as it contradicts the first.
> Holger Mueller, an analyst at Constellation Research, told TechCrunch Oracle’s scoop of TikTok “will add plenty of load to their infrastructure service.”
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2020/09/13/oracle-wins-bid-to-buy-tik...
"You are not allowed to spy on our citizens like that."
"Well, someone has to spy on them."
"You're right, we'll do it."
"OK, just don't interfere with OUR spying/propaganda programs and you can have all the US data for your own purposes."
"Deal."
It helps to know the context. I got wiped out in the dot-com boom of 2000. I needed a safe haven, Oracle was shelter from the storm. I got married, bought a house, had kids, and so for a while I was coasting.
"Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison earlier this year threw a fundraiser at his house for the president. Chief Executive Safra Catz also worked on the executive committee for the Trump transition team in 2016."
I can't see any scenario where this ends well. Reminds me of Dyson's electric car ambitions. Or the time I considered living in a van, I was quite drunk that day.
It never was about 'best fit' or "national security'.
It's corruption, clear as day.
https://www.businessinsider.com/oracle-billionaire-larry-ell...
Don’t need to go full conspiracy for no reason.
"All in": What is the guarantee that their entire infrastructure will be on Google Cloud? You are assuming a lot about how their backend infrastructure is structured.
> was ready to go all in on with Google until Donald reiterated, publicly, his demand that the US "get a cut" of any deal
Define "all in". For me, all in is when the entire company gets bought out by Google.
> his friends/himself profiting are likely synonymous. His personal interest and the national interest are the same, in his mind.
Again, unsubstantiated claims a.k.a conspiracy theory.
The fact is that his net worth has actually fallen drastically: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-08-14/trump-s-n...
If his motive is enriching himself/friends that should reflect in his/friends net worth.
I don't understand. Is being a donor automatically amount to corruption/illegal activity in the United States? I thought corporate donations to political parties were legal in the United States. If it is legal I don't see why the need to construct a conspiracy theory around it?
Money went from person A to person B. Person B made a decision so only person A profitted. I see a pattern. Don't you?
Then that is how it is in the rest of the World. I don't see why USA should be held with a different set of standards when literally all elections fought in every part of the world works through donations (be it corporate or private citizens). Very few countries banned corporate donations and those who did actually made it even worse. Take Brazil for instance: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/12/here-s-what-happened-...
Only the rich could contest elections (as they used their own money). People from lower/middle income strata hardly received any donations.
Banning corporate donations doesn't stop corporates from influencing elections. Corporates can themselves fund and run campaigns on individual issues that concern them and mobilize support with clever messaging.
> Money went from person A to person B. Person B made a decision so only person A profitted. I see a pattern. Don't you?
Yes everyone can see a "pattern" but that doesn't amount to corruption. That amounts to just an allegation. An allegation needs to be established through some legal route where in it is concluded without shred of doubt that the office was misused for helping out someone. Either a money/document/wiretapping trail that can connect the two things. If you cannot establish it then it remains a "conspiracy theory". Nothing more.
When we speak about USA and you bring Brazil in the discussion (whataboutism), you lower the bar. My "ideal" societies (progress, freedom, respect, and other such 'metrics') do NOT include Brazil, China, Iran, Russia, North Korea, Turkey. Brazil has selected as a ruler a former army general* who enjoys militarisation and is a fan of a dictatorship. I think the discussion ends here. Brazil may be doing 100 other things "good", but "showed that in 2010, about 6 percent of the Brazilian population lived in favelas and other slums" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Favela). 6%? Seriously?
I (-apologies for the bias-) prefer to hold in highest standards the EU, USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and a very few more. Although imperfect, still far better standard of Living than other countries/regiions.
That said, my ideal society is a Star Trek (TNG) one, where everyone contributes how they can, in a balance matter, everyone has free healthcare, everyone has a food replicator and never goes hungry.
*to avoid any misunderstanding, I am a honorable discharged army officer (of my country - NATO member), and I respect the Military-ies and what Military represents (protect the integrity of the land/sea/air)(and do NOT interfere in politics)
Edit: Brazil is a corrupt nation. Perhaps if the haves start caring for the have-nots, and the poverty/inequality is reduced, education is improved, then in 10-20-30 years Brazil will be VERY different to what it is now. These things take time. Moving to a good direction won't take you there tomorrow.
Political donations aren't going to a person, they're going to their campaign, so they can't just pocket the money and write a thank-you-note.
There's also a very benign reading of political donations: you give to a candidate because you expect them to be the best for the country, and what's best for the country is usually good for you as well, ergo you benefit. If there's a stated and clear quid pro quo, it's bribery, but otherwise: meh.
In this case, as far as I understand, it wasn't Trump that made the decision who TikTok would be sold to, he just decided it had to be an American company.
Ellison is open about supporting Trump. To say that Trump has been open about Tiktok is probably an understatement. Oracle has now won a high profile cloud contract they wouldn't have secured otherwise.
They have an obvious shared interest. Pay my back and I'll pat yours.
Does just having support or being a friend with a billionaire amount to corruption? What if Google was the beneficiary of the deal and not Oracle? Or what if Apple was the beneficiary of the deal and not Oracle?
Apple has also benefited from Trump's interventions. "Tim Cook said during an interview with Fox Business that the Trump administration enabled Apple to enter the Indian retail market." [1]
Does this also amount to corruption now?
[1]: https://www.businessinsider.in/tech/news/apple-ceo-tim-cook-...
> They have an obvious shared interest. Pay my back and I'll pat yours.
Even if there was some "obvious" shared interest it helps the US in the end doesn't it? It is not like it is something against USA. So what is the problem here?
By revealing incriminating evidence. Until then yes it was a conspiracy theory. Snowden did not just "say" that there was mega-surveillance. He actually revealed intricate details of how surveillance is carried out. Even though I disagree with how he revealed secret information, I still believe him because he produced evidence. He literally was in the know how of what happened and why it happened.
> So instead of a blanket statement that every case where no concrete legal evidence exists is equally false, each conspiracy case shall be treated separately.
I am not saying it is false. A conspiracy doesn't amount to falsity. The definition itself states: "Conspiracy theory, an attempt to explain harmful or tragic events as the result of the actions of a small, powerful group". That is it. It doesn't talk about the nature of the event/result of actions. I don't know why you think I am saying that it never happened. I am saying that these are allegations which haven't been proved yet.
> A person with personal ties with Trump getting a direct deal from a Trump driven decision has more basis of corruption and personal relations involvement than Tim saying the government policy eased their entrance to India.
You can say that about any US President then. Every single US President was well connected in some way or the other. How do you think Obama got his Nobel Peace Prize then? That too within 1 year into his office with literally nothing to back it. Was there some form of corruption between Obama and the Nobel Committee? There, I just created a conspiracy theory for you to ponder upon. Now what stops anyone from connecting anything and saying that there must be a reason for why something happened? Nothing! That is why you have Courts which can decide, with a high degree of certainty, that the allegations are true or false.
Why is mercantilism suddenly mainstream again?
That's too complicated, there is no way to know Larry would have ended up with the win like this.
TikTok was banned for 2 reasons:
1) Users on TT ganged together to screw up Trump's GOP convention. This means a) raising vengeful ire of Trump and b) serious implications for material political intervention by a an outside entity. Even though I don't think for a second the CCP had anything to do with it, the risk is materai.
2) National Security Risk. This is not a joke, almost all Chinese companies have 'CCP party apparatus', within the company to make sure they are following the party line, and they will hand over data for whatever purpose at anytime. Imagine having every US politician, Academic, CEO, Investors social medial - that's a lot of compromised individuals and you could compromise the country very quickly.
The reason TT should not be allowed even before 1 and 2 which are more controversial is simply trade - if foreign companies have to jump through hoops to play in China, those same hoops should be applied here tit-for-tat. Just on the basis of fair trade alone.
FYI Trump's bit about 'taking a cut' is just laughable, I honestly think he doesn't understand what 'trade' is, it's like he cannot seem to differentiate between 'his personal business' and anything else. Just like he cannot fathom how nations interact with one another, and sees everything in very personal terms i.e. with Putin, Erdogan etc..
I wonder where I heard this speech-pattern before?
- TikTok ruined Trumps rally
- Facebook is threatened by TikTok growth in US
- Zuck testifies before congress, pointing fingers at China and companies like TikTok
- Zuck met Trump, shaked hands under the table
- Trump asks TikTok to sell
- to Oracle.... best US company to curb TikTok growth
- Facebook does nothing about Trump posts
- Profit for Trump, less competitor for Zuck
- Things probably staged. What is one reason TikTok "chooses" Oracle over Microsoft?
edit: formatting
Now Tiktok has to please not one but two authoritarian governments.