Twitter Has An Expectations Problem
Winer Twitter’s announcement today. (Basically killing all client software.)
You know, Twitter could be a great business. One that is building out a larger and larger user base, inventing cool technology to support it, and selling the data to a variety of players in the ecosystem: analytics, brand management, risk management, interface designers. This could bring in a nice, solid revenue stream in the hundreds of millions.
Unfortunately, this kind of thinking:
“At this point, the floor of Twitter’s valuation should be $10 billion. If they sell, they should get a premium to that,” he said in an interview with DealBook on Wednesday.
…has them trampling all over developers in an effort to meet those capital market expectations – despite being a private company. Clearly someone’s focusing on the capital markets (guess who?), and fundamentally altering the ecosystem to get there and meet valuation expectations.
Of course, you can muddle through with this approach and land in the ballpark. So in a very real way, it’s not a problem from their end. It’s just not efficient from a consumer or market perspective (that’s capital, people, resources that could be allocated to doing the next cool thing).
-Shlok
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