They aren't investing in the present value, they are investing in the future value. Is Twitter going to be more or less relevant in 5 years? 10 years?
Twitter may receive formal bid, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google
261–270 of 361 posts
Re: Twitter may receive formal bid, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google
#262IMO, Twitter is the poster child for the tech bubble. They have users, which is their only claim to viability, but notably, they have never made a profit. Currently valued at around $10 billion with 350 million active users, that's about $29 per user. You'd be hard-pressed to find an investor so foolish that they would invest $29 in each of their users and hope to make it back if it were stated in those terms, but pe…
$29 per user doesn't seem that out of line from other companies I've worked for. Of course it totally depends on the business but it comes down to the expected revenue each of those users will generate.
Re: Twitter may receive formal bid, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry but I call bullshit on saying that "the arab spring" is the cause of ISIS and the syrian war. The sectarian corrupt violent syrian state and the U.S. invasion of Irak are much better suspects
The Arab Spring revolution became the Syrian Civil War, which became IS. Don't take away the agency of people in other countries to be evil, just because you believe the US is.
> The Arab Spring revolution became the Syrian Civil War, which became IS.
No, the Islamic State in Iraq, which arose in Iraq before the Arab Spring, became the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (and later simply the Islamic State) after sending offshoots to fight in the Syrian Civil War, and then reintegrating those offshoots. But it is a mistake to say that the Syrian Civil War "became" IS; before the Arab Spring and Syrian Civil War, the Islamic State in Iraq was already a substantial armed force holding territory and heavy weapons, most of which were taken from the Iraqi military, which it became as it grew up fueled largely by resistance to the US occupation (and, for a while, its temporary attachment to the al-Qaeda brand as "al-Qaeda in Iraq", which was useful when al-Qaeda was the most visible brand in Islamist opposition to the U.S., though eventually they outgrew the need to be a franchise of a foreign brand.)
Re: Twitter may receive formal bid, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google
#264Google acquiring Twitter is actually the best end result here. Salesforce is probably the worst. Lots of people hate the idea of a Google acquisition, but I think it's well suited because: - Google learnt from its mistakes with Google+ and is eager to not repeat them - The company is a very different one now from years ago - Google doesn't want to mess up identity again, so that wouldn't be an issue - Google mostly j…
Google has developed a brand problem, similar that Microsoft. I'm positive that many would stop using Twitter if they bought it.
And many people would start using Twitter if it was well integrated into some of Google's services.
Re: Twitter may receive formal bid, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
Incorrect.
O RLY?? http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2016/06/03/salesforce_aws_m...
http://trust.salesforce.com/trust/instances
These are all running in SFDC datacenters.
Re: Twitter may receive formal bid, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google has developed a brand problem, similar that Microsoft. I'm positive that many would stop using Twitter if they bought it.
Google has 7 different products with over 1 billion users [1]. This "brand problem" you speak of, if it exists at all, doesn't seem to have slowed them down much. [1] http://www.popsci.com/google-has-7-products-with-1-billion-u...
And all of them weren't launched in last 3 years.
Re: Twitter may receive formal bid, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Anyone that takes over the company is going to be doing massive layoffs. Rapidly-growing tech behemoths like Google can afford to acquihire hundred of engineers and, eventually, assign them to other work.
Maybe. But at the same time, with over 3,000 employees and a small set of products, that's not only a lot to take on but much of which is likely redundant. With so many surely they hold a fair amount of under performers as well.
What other work? Is there a company out there that actually has 3,000 employees-worth of work to get done, but nobody to do it? I thought we were in general facing the opposite problem: Lots of bodies but not enough work, leading to under-employment.
Re: Twitter may receive formal bid, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google
#268IMO, Twitter is the poster child for the tech bubble. They have users, which is their only claim to viability, but notably, they have never made a profit. Currently valued at around $10 billion with 350 million active users, that's about $29 per user. You'd be hard-pressed to find an investor so foolish that they would invest $29 in each of their users and hope to make it back if it were stated in those terms, but pe…
Their annual revenue is about $6 per user [1]. The problem isn't absolute failure to monetize, it's massive costs. If you thought you could run twitter without their ~4000 employees, you might have a chance of pulling some cash out of there. The problem is, it's hard to simultaneously clamp down on costs and push for growth. In SV, anything other than growth is an admission of failure. If you aren't flinging money in…
Have an up-vote. That's the big problem isn't it? It's no longer acceptable to simply get control of costs, make the ink black instead of red, and milk your product for a nice steady profit--then, once that happens, figure out if it's appropriate to grow from there.
Re: Twitter may receive formal bid, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oddball idea: If all these news outlets, and other organizations, benefit from it, maybe they could finance it. The same way the Linux Foundation is sponsored by large tech companies.
I can't imagine politicians funding Twitter.
I most definitely saw a Trump ad in my twitter feed.
I marked it as offensive ;)
Re: Twitter may receive formal bid, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
For Google to buy Twitter would be a reversal of a very entrenched strategy that can be summed up as "No niches!". That's why they scrapped Google Reader. There are very few exceptions to this strategy (Google apps for work and some cloud offerings) Twitter is not for everybody and never will be. Twitter is for those who publish information and for those who are interested in shaping their own information consumption…
Twitter is not as big as Facebook, but it is not a niche service in the sense that Reader was. Twitter has 300M worldwide users and can count as users most global celebrities, politicians, artists, and journalists. People that make news. Reader is not a good comparison at all.
A product whose primary appeal is to people who make and consume news is, ultimately, a niche product. The majority of people who Twitter might ever reach have seen it and realized it's not for them.
Twitter could absolutely be a valuable property, but it's never going to have the scale/reach of Google Search or Facebook.