Microsoft and social: TikTok-LinkedIn complementary

What if the next giant in the social world is what you don't expect, the one that has remained substantially on the sidelines to date? Not Google, which in its initiatives aimed at this area has repeatedly shown its limits. And not Facebook that although the current undisputed leader may sooner or later see his own parable take a downward trend as a consequence also of the many thorny issues related to privacy and antitrust. Not even Twitter, which despite the long stay in the sector has always remained a platform substantially equal to itself, for better or for worse. Microsoft's interest in TikTok that emerged somewhat surprisingly over the weekend suggests another hypothesis.

TikTok and Microsoft's social ambitions

Reaching for TikTok on the Redmond group would return to operate in a context, the purely consumer one, which in recent years has instead gradually abandoned, with the exception of the initiatives, products and services related to the Xbox family. And it would do so just when it is about to present itself again in the mobile segment with a smartphone, the Surface Duo, years after the failure of the Windows Phone project.

TikTok could be for Microsoft the complementary platform to LinkedIn to have a say in the social territory. Two services that are profoundly different in terms of target and purpose, which one alongside the other would go as far as to cover a potentially huge audience of users, without excluding even contact points.

it would Not be the first acquisition of a thickness under the guide of Satya Nadella , capable since its establishment in the role of CEO to inject a new route, less tied to the heavy legacy of the past and projected toward the opening cloud, to IA, to open source.

The deal would also enable the company to strengthen its position in the market of advertising , as well as considering how the user base is growing very quickly in the last two years, following the transition from what was before known as the Musical.ly . All this with the approval of the US authorities to even get him to chinese ByteDance could facilitate the transition, if not outright support it. It remains to be seen what would happen to the platform in the rest of the world: the deal would, in fact, only the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

Microsoft has not thrown in the melee social, head down, as others had done, with results often inauspicious, preferring to stay on the sidelines and observe, learning without exposing yourself from the mistakes of others and directing their investments to the acquisition of reality is already structured, rather than to create it from scratch. With LinkedIn, you may do it again with TikTok. And the time might give her reason.