I know this has been mentioned before, but Twitter should just charge for access to their API. They are really squandering opportunities, and I hope they will take a look in a new direction. Perhaps they could take a page from LinkedIn as well, and offer premium accounts where they save every tweet.<p>Personally, I think Twitter Ads are useless. For the price, I would have a hard time imagining that marketers would not get a better return out of Adsense or FB Ads.
An additional tragedy not mentioned is the broken circle of trust between developers, users, and service providers.<p>In the future, developers will be more skeptical of promising platforms, and users will be less willing to turn over their content and data to platforms that may only temporarily in a state of free and openness.<p>On the bright side, this may lead to more explicit, contractual openness for commercial platforms or the stronger emergence of completely open platforms as users and developers learn the lesson that it matters.<p>Social startups might take this to heart - as Google and others already have. Users and developers may well start to pay attention to that buried EULA and its back-out provisions designed to make sure you can assure investors that betraying your base for cash will always be a possibility.
As for IBM, its market cap is quite close to Microsoft, so I think they did reasonably well (they could have done even better if they've bet on software earlier, but that doesn't mean they should necessarily "bet outside their walls"). Also, the fact that they invested everything they had on an "open" platform (the PC architecture) is kind of an agreement to what you said they should have done... No?<p>As for Twitter, I find it funny that people see it as such a revolution. I mean, it's just a little social network with a very limited scope and features... I don't jmagine it revolutionizing more than it already does (it's a great outlet for the media, celebrities and breaking news, but I don't think it's sooo much more)... Or is it? :)
<i>They think that the only reason to create something is to make money. The more money the better. They're not wrong.</i><p>Arrgh... no. There are lots of reasons to create things. The biggest being personal gratification. The only reason to fund some creation is that long ago someone noticed a correlation between giving people money to do their thing and turning the results into profit.
I wonder why Twitter has never tried to do anything interesting with all the data they own. I can think of so many ways they can mine useful data from them (think of brand sentiment analysis). Or - how about exposing metrics like views, clicks etc. to businesses in a Pro account?