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Jack Dorsey Needs to Step Down

profgalloway.com

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Re: Jack Dorsey Needs to Step Down

#81

Post by amflare »

georgeecollins wrote: post #76
ISL wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should the product change? It is perhaps the most-successful one-to-many broadcast system in human history.

I agree about its success, but I think you could build off of that. Have you ever used other twitter clients? Why shouldn't the official client have at least some of the features they offer? Let me ask the HN community! Can anybody here suggest a feature that they would like added to Twitter?

Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. "Better" is subjective anyway. Any change with make some people mad, and no change will make others mad. If your product is stable, that's about the best you can hope for. No need to keep tweaking it out of boredom.

Re: Jack Dorsey Needs to Step Down

#82

Post by Solvitieg »

hintymad wrote: post #36

What's curious to me is how Twitter made so few improvements so slowly during the past few years, when its Chinese counterpart, Weibo, could release waves of new features in fast pace. Not that all the new features are good in users' eyes, of course, but isn't fast iteration a motto in the Bay Area?

Reminds me of the first part of Zawinski's law: "Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail."

Twitter could add features until it reaches feature parity with Facebook. But then it's no longer Twitter.

What defines a platform is its feature set. And by changing that you risk changing the platform.

Re: Jack Dorsey Needs to Step Down

#83

Post by spsful »

patelh wrote: post #57
georgeecollins wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you kidding? Twitter is a tech company with a great brand and a monopoly platform that has a stock that performs like a mall chain. The rate of product change is so slow. There are so many opportunities for growth that are not advertising. Seriously, if you can't push out a CEO for under-performance in this case, when can you.

There is no real comparison. Twitter is unique in its market (where it makes money). You can't really compare it to Facebook.

That is also true. I did agree with the author's position that Dorsey should not be the chief executive of both Square and Twitter. That's probably his strongest case towards removal.

But your point about Twitter's uniqueness is also valid, and something I hadn't seriously thought of before. Around the time of their IPO, I think the general analyst consensus was that Twitter would not make money and their stock was not a buy. It makes sense because their product is wholly different from the suites offered by Facebook or Google, the companies this article and the commenter compare it to. Perhaps the other stakeholders understood this aspect of Twitter and didn't expect large returns from day 1.

Re: Jack Dorsey Needs to Step Down

#84

Post by _8j50 »

georgeecollins wrote: post #47
patelh wrote: post #37

Drivel. Nothing directly actionable. If a CEO has to be physically in his office to successfully run the company, he has done a poor job in building leadership under him/her. Jack is doing what he should be, finding new growth opportunities. Milking the users with more Ads will just piss off users for short term gains.

Are you kidding? Twitter is a tech company with a great brand and a monopoly platform that has a stock that performs like a mall chain. The rate of product change is so slow. There are so many opportunities for growth that are not advertising. Seriously, if you can't push out a CEO for under-performance in this case, when can you.

The rate of product change at twitter is something every company should learn from!

Devs like new features a lot more than users do. Users feel disrupted by new features. Users don't open up their favorite app and say "gee whiz,I wonder what new feature there is today". Users don't even think about twitter, they think about tweets,replies,likes and other users. You focus on what matters to users, not what matters to devs and everyone else who does not get the user base.

Imagine feature-creep at their scale! Twitter is the most tolerable mainstream social media network I know of for many reasons -- all centered around their resistance to change and refusal to follow the trends at fb,instagram,snapchat,linkedin,etc...

Repeat with me: you don't need more growth if everyone is happy and you already have a steady and growing profit. You want more growth of course but you don't need it. You focus on what you have and need first then you consider your wants and features...very slowly.

Re: Jack Dorsey Needs to Step Down

#85

Post by hintymad »

giarc wrote: post #52
robbyt wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't you think that scaling to handle global growth is a feature?

Except twitters DAU has been pretty steady at around 300-315 million since 2015. https://www.statista.com/statistics/282087/number-of-monthly...

Yeah, and Twitter’s user base has not increased much. Scalability is not really that much of problem.

Re: Jack Dorsey Needs to Step Down

#86

Post by buboard »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #34
larnmar wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s still a trivial fraction of the company.

> It’s still a trivial fraction of the company It's an activist position, not a takeover. The shares are acquired for (a) shareholder rights, which can be accomplished with a single share and (b) economic upside. When a hedge fund pursues this strategy, it typically purchases advertising to make its case. (The case isn't just made to current shareholders. Shares owned by a sympathizer who bought on your activism vote…

how is an activist shareholder different from an activist?

Re: Jack Dorsey Needs to Step Down

#87

Post by ghostbrainalpha »

paggle wrote: post #71

How did this professor get his hands on $10m of Twitter stock?

Galloway founded the digital intelligence firm L2 Inc, which was acquired in March 2017 by Gartner for $155 million, and the now defunct Firebrand Partners (founded in 2005), an activist hedge fund that has invested over $1 billion in U.S. consumer and media companies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Galloway_(professor)

Re: Jack Dorsey Needs to Step Down

#88

Post by buboard »

georgeecollins wrote: post #47
patelh wrote: post #37

Drivel. Nothing directly actionable. If a CEO has to be physically in his office to successfully run the company, he has done a poor job in building leadership under him/her. Jack is doing what he should be, finding new growth opportunities. Milking the users with more Ads will just piss off users for short term gains.

Are you kidding? Twitter is a tech company with a great brand and a monopoly platform that has a stock that performs like a mall chain. The rate of product change is so slow. There are so many opportunities for growth that are not advertising. Seriously, if you can't push out a CEO for under-performance in this case, when can you.

sure you can pull a digg and expect more money, but actually lose your users to a competitor. i 'd definitely quit twitter if it starts doing things like what facebook did to FB-page owners by holding their audience hostage for ransom. I think twitter, like reddit, inherently don't have high monetization potential because their format doesn't appeal to the massive audiences which flock to fb / instagram

Re: Jack Dorsey Needs to Step Down

#89

Post by dhimes »

anaphor wrote: post #51
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Well, that's your problem It looks like an activist position. The shares were acquired with the view of making them more valuable through direct action. This is a validated hedge fund strategy.

That seems pretty likely to fail. How often does that actually result in positive gains?

Yahoo went through this with Carl Icahn.
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