This is probably an unpopular opinion and for certain I lack the qualification to run a public company of about 4000 people and hence to make snarky comments on the internet.
However it's my common sense that tells me there's something going very wrong with Twitter: let's be honest, their product is a message server with a fancy website wrapped around it and an attached ad-business. There's absolutely NO WAY it takes 4000 employees to run this thing! For comparison Whatsapp had ~ 60 employees when it was bought by FB and Instagram had 13. And I'd venture to say that both of these companies had more data to manage than Twitter has now.
Because he is often working at Square, many managers arrive late, depart early and generally show up just to “punch the time card”, says one former senior executive who has sold all of his shares.
And my common sense tells me it's probably not just the managers but also about 90% of the engineers. I don't mean to be derogatory towards Twitter employees but I truly wonder what everybody at this company is doing all day. The product is not improving in any meaningful way. The few innovations that they launched were all acquired businesses.
Twitters quarterly expenses are now around 700 million. Let me make a very conservative estimate: It would probably not take more than 100 million per quarter to run the business (including their ad business). Likely much less. Their revenue is 600 million per quarter. If Twitter were a properly run company they could be making half a billion per quarter in profit which they could use to explore new business opportunities, products, or if there's a total lack of ideas, pay out to shareholders. I'd argue that any of these options would be a whole lot better than the status right now.
> I truly wonder what everybody at this company is doing all day.
when a business lacks proper product focus there are an infinite amount of issues to work on each day. it is in this kind of environment that everything seems important and all prioritization is treated as urgent. people burn out in this kind of workplace and this is what it looks like is happening over at twitter.
When Snapchat (a pretty good comparable for Twitter) raised in 2014, they said they had 100 million monthly active users [1]. According to leaked financials [2] they were doing it on about 10 million a month, or just 30 million per quarter.
Twitter supposedly has 300 million MAUs, so your estimate of 100 million/quarter may be right on the money.
So it's safe to say that Twitter needs more of an organizational shakeup and not a feature one? Because that's what's always annoyed me about Twitter since I've been using more regularly as of 2014 is how badly managed it is and how often they focus on putting in features no one cares about (who exactly uses moments?). And all the while their existing features and phone apps are just a mess. There's abuse reports often go unanswered for weeks, yet suspensions are doled out for the silliest thing like sharing a gif but if someone doxes nothing happens. It's a wonder anyone who I follow sticks around.
There's a difference between $2.5B/year hard, and $500M/year hard, and between those and $50M/hard.
The front end (tight "amount of data and latency requirements") are probably doable on $50M/year, as WhatsApp was doing something comparable on much less than that.
I know where some of the money went - tens of projects like Bootstrap, which have benefited the community at large, but whose value to twitter is probably not on par with the costs. But that still does not explain even a small fraction of where the money goes.
to be fair, an issue with whatsapp is fundamentally inward facing. lose a couple of old messages? you're on the free tier, what do you want?
twitter on the other hand - a publicly liked and massively supported tweet/twitter account disappears or starts having malfunctions and the whole service is maligned. "free speech is being threatened" etc etc
twitter has been used for mass protests/revolutions because of it's reach and stability. do you think whatsapp would have done the same? they were still transmitting plain text between users and it was trivially easy to view someone else's texts for quite some time
I disagree. There are whatsapp groups of hundreds of members, some used for political action. If they indeed lose messages, people notice.
I'm not sure why you bring up plaintext (it is irrelevant, regardless of Twitter still being plaintext itself).
Engineering wise, the user-visible side of Twitter is more or less as complex as the user visible side of whatsapp. Both can be done on very modest hardware with modest operations if they are properly done. Whatsapp was lean (and probably still is). Twitter never was.
apologies i brought up plaintext as an example of a thing messaging clients should fundamentally not do but whatsapp never got around to fixing until it became a real issue for them, hell p2p encryption was only done this year
However it's my common sense that tells me there's something going very wrong with Twitter: let's be honest, their product is a message server with a fancy website wrapped around it and an attached ad-business. There's absolutely NO WAY it takes 4000 employees to run this thing! For comparison Whatsapp had ~ 60 employees when it was bought by FB and Instagram had 13. And I'd venture to say that both of these companies had more data to manage than Twitter has now.
Because he is often working at Square, many managers arrive late, depart early and generally show up just to “punch the time card”, says one former senior executive who has sold all of his shares.
And my common sense tells me it's probably not just the managers but also about 90% of the engineers. I don't mean to be derogatory towards Twitter employees but I truly wonder what everybody at this company is doing all day. The product is not improving in any meaningful way. The few innovations that they launched were all acquired businesses.
Twitters quarterly expenses are now around 700 million. Let me make a very conservative estimate: It would probably not take more than 100 million per quarter to run the business (including their ad business). Likely much less. Their revenue is 600 million per quarter. If Twitter were a properly run company they could be making half a billion per quarter in profit which they could use to explore new business opportunities, products, or if there's a total lack of ideas, pay out to shareholders. I'd argue that any of these options would be a whole lot better than the status right now.