Well, one would hope so. Fortunately, Twitter doesn't have one of those "president for life" two-class stock setups like Google and Facebook. The stockholders can fire Dorsey when necessary.<p>The post-growth phase of a social network doesn't have to mean its collapse. Look at IAC, InterActive Corp (iac.com, ticker IAC). They run a lot of sites - Vimeo, Ask, About, Investopedia, Tinder, OKCupid, etc. - have a market cap of about $5 billion, and keep plugging along. They were started by Barry Diller, the creator of the Home Shopping Channel, something else that keeps plugging along. Diller is still CEO. IAC is boring but useful.<p>Twitter doesn't have to "exit"; they're already publicly held. They just have to trim down to a profitable and stable level, and accept that they're post-growth.
> The company has been rolling out products faster than ever, she noted, and has boosted engagement through enhancements to the timeline, such as showing people the most relevant tweets first.<p>The endeavor that drove me, a passionate user for several years, off the site for good. It's sad that they watered themselves down to become a second-place Facebook.<p>Maybe it's not even their fault, and it's just a side effect of being a public company and being measured by growth instead of by the uniqueness and quality of the product. It's still sad.<p>When the dust settles, there will be lesson in the danger of engagement-metric based product design. Twitter has a "while you were away" feature that shows you their idea of the tweets they'd like you to see first. (Even if you return to the site 5 minutes after your last session.) (This is different from the non-chronological timeline, and doesn't get turned off when you disable that.)<p>When you dismiss it, it asks you if you'd like to see less of that. It's completely ambiguous and unexplained whether they're asking whether you disliked those specific tweets or the non-chronological aspect of the timeline. A lot of users have been vocal about hating the feature. By dismissing it are they actually burying certain friends down further on their timeline? Who knows? Some people are guessing correctly what the meaning is, but others aren't. They're feeding a certain amount of garbage input into their algorithms.
Wow. They really are Yahoo. Founders take a back-seat in the midst of hyper-growth. Outside management team sourced from other industries (CFO of the NFL, for a tech company?). Product pivot into believing they're a media company. Eclipsed by newer technologies. Founder CEO returns amidst flat stock performance and boardroom turmoil. Exploring a sale to other big companies, who can't afford it because the market cap is too inflated. Talk of needing a turnaround CEO.<p>Maybe they should hire Marissa Mayer. I hear she'll be looking for a job in the near future, and she's got plenty of relevant experience.
Maybe this is what Twitter is. It Generates a couple billion in revenue. Instead of trying to grow how about shrinking the costs. If a company can consistently generate a billion dollar in cash flow that is pretty good. They don't need to have 4000 employees. Maybe they need to go down to 2000,1000 or 500. Maybe you won't be able to get the best talent, but I am sure you can find some people to run it.
Twitter keeps ignoring what its users want, and pushing ridiculous features nobody asked for.<p>Keep the timeline chronological! Instead of injecting 12 hour old tweets into my timeline randomly, give me a tab of popular tweets by people I follow.<p>Give me more options to discover interesting discussions. Let me subscribe to or follow hashtags.<p>Give me more options for filtering out the noise. Let me provide hashtags or keywords I don't care about.<p>Back before Twitter made the decision to transition from a service to a platform, there were Twitter apps and clients that provided all kinds of great ways to interact with Twitter. But Twitter shut them down, and never bothered to integrate the things that made them great into the official Twitter platform or apps.<p>Twitter's greatest potential is as a firehose of live data. Give users the tools to use and personalize that data and Twitter will become an indispensable part of people's daily lives.
In my opinion this isn't about Dorsey but about Twitter.<p>In 1984, Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus unveiled a unicorn. Later investigation revealed it to be a goat with its horns fused together.
This is <i>the reason</i> Jack Dorsey's return was doomed to failure. He was half-time and didn't take control like a general commanding troops must.<p>He was the Executive Officer but he was not a Chief Executive Officer.<p>For someone in this position, the natural human incentive is to build consensus and avoid ruffling feathers. An employee revolt could have gotten him fired. He had to worry what people thought.<p>Steve Job's return to Apple was dominating. He absolutely worked more than anyone else and ran circles around anyone trying to get in his way. And he fired people and replaced the board with friends. Things people would have faulted him for had he not had time to see his plans through.<p>But..even if he had gone full-time and led a successful coup, he probably would have still failed. Twitter was truly an accident and so no one really knows what it is.
There is only a finite amount of energy a person has and a finite amount of hours awake, you know? I can't imagine trying to re-steer Twitter while also being an effective CEO at a place like Square.
Turnarounds are super hard. A year isn't long enough and Dorsey would have been wise to both set expectations clearly that this is a 3+ year trek as well as lock in some protective provisions around that timeline.<p>Given the actual state of affairs though, the Board has a clear fiduciary duty to consider all options.<p>Since Dorsey didn't give himself enough time to actually effect a true fundamental product/vision turnaround, he would've been far wiser to simply focus on driving revenue as a first step. Then circle back to product later.<p>It seems the strategy here was either unclear or unrealistic.
On another note, I don't know why the Bay Area is so obsessed with cheesy. I mean, they do the most cliche, cheesy, predictable things in this regard, then try to poorly hype it as "profound and visionary thinking." They keep trying to recreate the magic that happened with Steve Jobs in 1997, for example. And they keep failing.<p>They probably aren't even really trying to recreate the magic, just trying to associate themselves with it and use that to take credit for what happened in that case. This is the kind of twisted backward stupid logic that was prevalent in the area while I was there (2008 - 2011). It was just more BS every time.<p>I mean, if you are trying to recreate the magic or emulate what's been done in the past, then do that, rather than do the dumbest things, then try to poorly and illogically spin it (in the most tired, played out, and "has never been successful" way) to look like something else.<p>Add to that the overrepresented judger (MBTI) population, and you have a recipe for the shht of everything past constantly repeating in the worst way, as arrogant egotistical self-centered know-nothing idiots use it to try to credit themselves with being something other than the dumbest shht.
TWTR has such much potential, there is not single day goes by that I won't hear Twitter's name been mentioned in some news or on TV. With Donald Trump as your Chief Marketing Officer for free, working day and night diligently, how could you not grow your user number?<p>The only reason you are not growing user number is you have an inferior user experience comparing with Facebook/Snapchat. That is something really easy to fix by just copying what other guys are doing better, but Dorsey did nothing. He lost interest long ago. TWTR does not need to sell, just need someone who is passionate, maybe a good engineer who knows the product.
I would love to have more privacy-focused features and more distance from the whole "everything's public" mantra -- following a user without anyone else knowing, following a user for only a specific hashtag, private-only hashtags.<p>The whole "everything's public or everything's private" shtick just doesn't work for me.
Serious question, I'm genuinely not trolling here. How can Twitter (or any other social site) be expected to maintain a high rate of new users, forever? After the first few hundred million users, wouldn't one expect new registrations to slow down a bit?
Here is the legacy of Jack and Twitter, ex 1: Dilbert creator:<p><a href="http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-10-03/dilbert-creator-scott-adams-shadowbanned-twitter-after-trump-support" rel="nofollow">http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-10-03/dilbert-creator-sco...</a><p>How much traffic is that?<p>Ex: 2 Milo. Etc. So... what business is he in?
Twitter needs to do the following:<p>- Replace their mediocre management team (3.2 rating on Glassdoor, versus a threshold of 4.0 or a "damn, management's good" of 4.2) with people that actually know what they're doing<p>- Replace their mediocre management team (3.2 rating on Glassdoor, versus a threshold of 4.0 or a "damn, management's good" of 4.2) with people that actually know what they're doing<p>- Replace their mediocre management team (3.2 rating on Glassdoor, versus a threshold of 4.0 or a "damn, management's good" of 4.2) with people that actually know what they're doing<p>- Replace their mediocre management team (3.2 rating on Glassdoor, versus a threshold of 4.0 or a "damn, management's good" of 4.2) with people that actually know what they're doing<p>- Replace their mediocre management team (3.2 rating on Glassdoor, versus a threshold of 4.0 or a "damn, management's good" of 4.2) with people that actually know what they're doing<p>- Reduce the number of employees to 1,555<p>- Hire an additional 259-585 quality people (engineers and designers, mainly) to fix user experience and engineering issues<p>- Start paying attention to the user base and deliver what's actually needed<p>- Innovate and push things forward, rather than settling into stagnation and decline<p>There's really not much to it. Twitter is only having problems because they keep messing up, stagnating, or doing the dumbest things.
The biggest problem I think is that they constantly add features that don't improve the core functionality. For example, Moments really don't help with hashtag filtering, conversation searching, and the like. All they need to do is make it easier to filter conversations, basically. It's not that hard to see why that would get more people on board since they could make sense of their time line. But it seems Dorsey and company would rather just pile on stuff that's not related to that. I don't get their motivation for this. Can someone can explain it?
This along with the recent bidding could explain why Twitter is "suddenly" not censoring anti-Hillary/pro-Trump trending topics anymore. They didn't want anymore negative press about it when the negotiations started.
Twitter and Snapchat need to merge. But their stock prices are hyperinflated.<p>The businesses are very similar. The products are similar. The trends are similar. Even the demographics are similar. It is a shame that Twitter can't be more, when it totally needs to be more. And snapchat can do so much better too.<p>But the problem might be they are tripping over the problems in front of them, not pursuing solutions to problems that lie ahead.
“Jack is a good entrepreneur,” Slingerlend said. “But Twitter needs a turnaround CEO, and that’s a completely different job.”<p>I am not sure if I agree with the above conclusion that Twitter needs a turnaround CEO. I think Twitter needs to fully execute the live streaming strategy and see where they go from there and Jack needs to become a full time CEO and handoff Square to somebody else. Bring Mark Zuckerburg on to the board so they start learning how to execute on social. These are some small changes they can make to win back investors and win back some credibility.
The USGOV spends roughly $90 billion a year hoping to influence or read the policy intentions of other states and non-state actors. Having shattered the wall between public and private institutions with its $11 billion dollar bailout of General Motors, why not partner with Blackstone Group and take Twitter private? The company's value in advancing US interests is immense and that value will die a swift death in Disney's hands.
I hope you're all happy when the product gets fingerbanged to death by legions of mediocre corporate managers at whichever soulless quarterly-earnings addicted too-lobbied-to-fail corporate institution acquires them, just so the financiers can get their fucking Twitter check.<p>If Twitter didn't change a fucking thing for the rest of my life I'd still use it and love it. Forever.
As a side note, I have been thinking of Yishan-style CEOs for a while now, with board of directors tweeting often too. Twitter itself would probably be a good candidate for such a public company.
It does speak volumes of Twitter that even Google and Facebook want to keep distance. Is it because there is nothing to see here? no product that works meaningfully?