[mschuster91]

> It also frees the management from "fear of God"

It doesn't really matter if the "God" is Wall Street or a holding company like Alphabet.

Only that I'd trust a holding company to be forced to maintain the company in order to not risk its value. A stock holder on Wall St just wants as much profit as possible as fast as possible, and if it goes bust then you can always sell shorts and still profit.

[melted]

It does. Alphabet would care a great deal more if Twitter lives or dies. Wall St doesn't care in the slightest.

[mschuster91]

On the other side, Google doesn't always follow this rule and I wouldn't trust them much more to look after Twitter than Wall St.

Google has killed off (or left to rot, and then kill off) projects with huge user counts/business outlooks in the past... remember Google Reader and Google Code?

Both could have kicked Feedly's and Github's/SF's asses multiple times over with a bit of investment, and Google basically let them rot until the backend of Google's infrastructure changed too much to justify the needed adaptions on the projects.

[melted]

User counts were so pitifully small in those projects that they were destaffed for years before they were shut down.

[mschuster91]

Reader had iirc at least a million users, that's only small when you compare it with FB/Instagram/Twitter/Youtube/Snapchat.

Most startups would kill for a million highly engaged users.

[melted]

I believe G+ had 300M+ users at the time, and G+ was still considered a failure. 1M is a rounding error by Google standards. They can get 1M users by releasing _anything_ that does _anything_ at this point.