Salesforce wud be an interesting prospect. Not sure how wud it fit in their business plan
Twitter may receive formal bid, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google
141–150 of 361 posts
Re: Twitter may receive formal bid, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google
#142Why no mention of Oracle? That's a more likely acquirer than Salesforce. Other Oracle acquisitions: Datastax, push.io, Collective Intellect, etc.
Has Oracle shown an interest? But like Salesforce, why would Oracle they be interested? I may be missing something but it is not at all obvious how twitter is related to the type of thing those two companies are currently doing.
Re: Twitter may receive formal bid, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google
#143IMO, 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…
> If you find yourself thinking that Twitter is a company with any real value What about non-monetary value like playing a key role in 'Arab Spring'[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_and_the_Arab_Spri...
You mean the same Arab Spring that sparked 4 or 5 civil wars (depending how you count), led to the rise of IS, and in the civil wars aftermaths caused more civil wars in neighbor countries that were invaded by foreign guerrilla fighters?
When I made some napkin calculations some time ago, Arab Spring and its fallout so far killed about 300.000 people and displaced millions. Is the positive non monetary value enough to compensate that much deaths and destruction?
Re: Twitter may receive formal bid, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
And Wave.
Wave was too ahead of its time. Bots in channels that could translate and issue arbitrary actions? In 2009? Nonsense.
I imagined a "gmail inbox", but with each "email" instead being an arbitrary widget. So you'd share a spreadsheet via "email", but it's not an attachment... it's an actual spreadsheet being shared.
I was less excited when I found Wave was its own product, rather than a Gmail integration. Putting the widgets inside the same email inbox you have open for hours each day would be the best way to get people to actually use it.
Re: Twitter may receive formal bid, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wave was too ahead of its time. Bots in channels that could translate and issue arbitrary actions? In 2009? Nonsense.
It was not ahead of its time, it was poorly executed. People didn't know what to make of it. That is the designers fault. They needed to relate it to existing ideas and beat those ideas at their own game, even if that mean restricting what it can do to familiar domains. Then over time they can evolve it while taking the users along with them. Instead people bounced off it and decided to wait it out to see if they rea…
> It was not ahead of its time, it was poorly executed. People didn't know what to make of it.
Eh, the biggest problem with using Wave was that it was only just barely usable on top-tier hardware of the time. So, for most people, it was impossible to run on their own hardware (especially on their laptops).
I think that if the performance hadn't been an issue (ie, the average hardware in 2009 had been capable of what it is in 2016), it could actually have been comparably successful to Google Docs or Google Calendar.
Re: Twitter may receive formal bid, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google
#146If you try to make people want what you make, you end up making something disposable, a short-lived romance.
Re: Twitter may receive formal bid, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed on poor finances. But Twitter has one thing that no one else has - they are in the center of the zeitgeist. Every political candidate is on Twitter. Every news network discusses Twitter happenings everyday. NFL broadcasts list players' Twitter handles. Half the commercials on TV advertise hashtags. South Park just did a whole episode about Twitter. The cost to embed your brand in the minds of Americans like th…
There are plenty of people who use Facebook and don't use Twitter. Facebook is certainly more ubiquitous, it's just not quite as easy to tell you where someone's FB page is the way you can just have "@BarackObama" in the ticker.
A (somewhat less significant) number of people use Twitter and not Facebook.
Facebook seems to have a reputation of being more ubiquitous, yet creepier than Twitter.
Re: Twitter may receive formal bid, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google
#148Can someone actually explain to me how the situation came to this point where it practically looks as if Twitter's fate is being decided and played out in the media via endless speculation? It is not like Twitter is a tiny company with an unknown brand, few users and no possibility of improving its profit margins. I am not aware of what they are trying to do, but at the same time it is not as if they could have exhau…
the beneficiary would be whereever facebook users go. I doubt that would be twitter. Twitter is a replacement for the rss/followjournalist/commentsection of newspapers, and a megaphone for celebrities and athletes. People go to twitter because the journalist/athlete/celebrity they desire to follow is a twitter user.
Re: Twitter may receive formal bid, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google
#149IMO, 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…
Be careful conflating "never made a profit" with not having a business. They made $710M in revenue last quarter, up 48% yoy. Their expenses might be high, but they can address that. Companies like Amazon didn't make a profit for years, and are rightfully quite valuable in the eyes of the market.
A $29 valuation per MAU is low if anything. Facebook is almost 10x that (and deserves to be). Early stage startups often get 50x that or higher.