One of the head-scratching moments of 2020 was when the world got to know that Microsoft proposed acquiring some portion of TikTok as Donald Trump’s administration was coming down hard on the platform. Microsoft is a company that makes money selling productivity software and services while TikTok is a social network. Seemingly, there was nothing in common.
The mystery was somewhat solved when Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella addressed the issue at the Code Conference this week. “It’s the strangest thing I’ve ever sort of worked on,” Nadella told Recode’s Kara Swisher at Code Conference 2021. The drama lasted a couple of months and it folded up as quickly as it had unfolded. But Nadella didn’t say what it was negotiating with Trump, pushing his coyness over answers.
He also said: “TikTok came to us, we didn’t go to TikTok…. TikTok was caught in between a lot of issues that they were having across two capitals, and they wanted to partner.” After Microsoft, there was a time when the world heard of TikTok striking up a deal with Oracle. But that’s on hold and nobody knows what’s happening with that.
But Nadella also thought that TikTok might have been a good fit because it was a social, cloud-based service that heavily leveraged AI, things that are focus for the company. Some of Microsoft’s biggest acquisitions since Nadella took charge have been Minecraft in 2014, LinkedIn in 2016 and GitHub in 2018, each of them being about building community.
