Twitter Is Betting Everything on Jack Dorsey

Post by rsync » Thu, Jun 02, 2016, 3:05 PM UTC

wslh wrote: post #14

(Note to Jack Dorsey fans: if you want to downvote downvote with arguments) Obviously Jack Dorsey is not very capable and is bad at business execution. There is/was a simple way to increase Twitter revenue and profits: giving small and medium companies a way to pay for entry level access to their API in the same way Google AdWords, etc work. I think there is a lot of money there but they only know about wholeselling…

Post by harryh » Thu, Jun 02, 2016, 3:14 PM UTC

jhayward wrote: post #15

harryh wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Certainly they can. The issue is that the stockholders had previously believed that this limit was much much higher. They also, to some degree, still believe that (And maybe they are right. Maybe not. It's hard to say!). So if you are the management team at twitter and your stockholders think you could be doing better you are at constant risk of getting fired.

This mismatch between expectation and reality is why so many internet companies "die". It's not that their business model failed, necessarily, it's that management, or the board, has set expectations for growth that defy reason. The company then has to embark on an ever-more-doomed set of initiatives to try to meet growth targets, which inevitably fail. Many companies could still be thriving today (e.g., Yahoo), if n…

Post by baldfat » Thu, Jun 02, 2016, 3:16 PM UTC

noam87 wrote: post #32

pi-err wrote: post #6

Twitter has an incredibly powerful brand and appeal. How many companies can say they triggered revolutions? Yet it's puzzling how much it fails to improve its basic product, 1 year in Dorsey's comeback. On mobile, the search/explore screens are mostly irrelevant. On desktop, they could position themselves as quasi TV channels with live content update. Yes, they lost the social wars and that's fine. They won the media…

> Yet it's puzzling how much it fails to improve its basic product. What's there to improve? As someone else said here on HN "Twitter should have been an RFC." The only thing that's broken here is not Twitter, it's the economic system that can't just let a useful invention be, but instead forces it into a fight-or-die, conquer-the-world-or-disappear nuclear arm's race. Facebook was just fine as a place to keep in tou…

Post by reitanqild » Thu, Jun 02, 2016, 3:22 PM UTC

rsync wrote: post #31

wslh wrote: post #14

(Note to Jack Dorsey fans: if you want to downvote downvote with arguments) Obviously Jack Dorsey is not very capable and is bad at business execution. There is/was a simple way to increase Twitter revenue and profits: giving small and medium companies a way to pay for entry level access to their API in the same way Google AdWords, etc work. I think there is a lot of money there but they only know about wholeselling…

"(Note to Jack Dorsey fans: if you want to downvote downvote with arguments)" Don't discuss your own votes. Don't interrupt the actual discussion to meta-discuss the scoring system.

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jun 02, 2016, 3:24 PM UTC

simonswords82 wrote: post #25

Twitter's product is broken in more ways than I care to recount. End users and developers are constantly complaining about it - and they're the power users who see the value in it! Everybody else is "meh" about Twitter despite the potential. Add Jack in to that mix, a guy who who has a lot of passion and intelligence but is split across Square and Walt Disney and I have to say the answer is 'no', betting on him to si…