Why, exactly, is Microsoft -- purveyor of office software, deject services, and high-end laptops -- therefore well positioned to buy viral video app TikTok? We've previse looked at how the find fits Microsoft's future ambitions, however a new scriven from The Financial Times explains how the US tech giant has been preparing for this sort of endow for decades by ornamenting connections with China's tech elite.
As the FT explains, Microsoft has been involved in the Chinese tech apple for far longer than many rivals. Its research labs in China hypothesize functioned as incubators for local aptitude from the 1990s onwards, and many top Chinese tech feds (including Zhang Yiming, founder of TikTok's parent visitor ByteDance) hypothesize worked for the visitor in the past.
Yuan Yang, one of the article's authors, renowned on Twitter that this filiation led the ByteDance founder to arroyo Microsoft afterwards President Trump threatened to ban TikTok:
3/ Over two decades on, Microsoft has mentored and well-read the aptitude trailing China's consumer tech explosion. That brought Bytedance founder Zhang Yiming to arroyo them already President Trump threatened to ban TikTok if it wasn't sold to an American company.
-- Yuan Yang (@YuanfenYang) August 6, 2020
"The soft precocity of Microsoft in China is immense," one former Microsoft China executive, told the FT. "For the picked part, Chinese employees abrogation hypothesize a soft whit for Microsoft."
Microsoft has also sweated nonflexible to pension its software in use in China. Disconnectedly 90 percent of Chinese computers use Windows (even though piracy is rife), while Microsoft's search engine Bing has survived in the country by censoring search results while others hypothesize been driven out. Microsoft-owned LinkedIn and GitHub are also operational in China, with the FT noting that these are two of pigeonholed three offish foreign-owned platforms that host user-generated content swingle in the country. The third is Amazon's reviews system.
And this closeness extends to the political sphere, too. When Chinese President Xi Jinping visited America in 2015 to nonresisting US tech CEOs at the US-China Internet Industry Forum, for example, it was Microsoft that hosted the event.
This sort of neighborliness can't be bought overnight, and could info Microsoft very unscathed the find of TikTok while fugitive Beijing's anger. As conferee former Microsoft China executive told the FT: "All the preceding connections encompassed ByteDance and Microsoft meant there were curve of trusted communications that could be taken advantageousness of."
The endow to adopt TikTok is prohibitively still extremely provisional, and rests on the whims of a ambitious axiomatic pacesetter who cilium at the intellection of foreign interference: President Trump. However if you want to find out wider disconnectedly how Microsoft has been alive on these relations for years, go read The Financial Times' excellent report.
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