Oracle, the $175bn enterprise software giant, has finally bested arch-rival Microsoft in the contest for lip-sync video sensation TikTok. That prompts a question. When is a sale not a sale? When it is a “technology partnership”, apparently. 

If you were trying to explain this deal to a teenage TikTok fan you might say: imagine the Hype House of influencers tried to convince TikTok star Charli D’Amelio to join, but only succeeded in getting her to redirect her mail. The arrangement looks like a fudge. Instead of an outright acquisition of TikTok’s US assets from its Chinese parent ByteDance — something the US government has pushed for — Oracle is expected to seek to host TikTok’s US user data and take a stake in the company.

Theoretically, a deal with TikTok could bolster Oracle’s cloud business. Its attempt to shift from a legacy vendor of software licences into cloud computing has been slow. In first-quarter earnings to September it reported a mere 2 per cent rise in “cloud services and licence support” on the previous year — although this unit also includes fees for traditional software. Cloud licence and on-premise licence sales rose 9 per cent. Contrast that with Amazon’s cloud division, where sales rose 29 per cent in the past quarter. Or Microsoft’s, where they grew 47 per cent.