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by thebiglebrewski 3419 days ago
What are people's opinions on the most optimistic case for Twitter (the business)?
5 comments

They get acquired by the Executive Branch of the US Government and relabeled "The Voice of Freedom"? :-)
Might be best solution for government if Facebook starts blocking 'alternative facts'.
Haha wow. This is already the worst of all possible dimensions but that would be rich
Obviously (I hope) my comment was intended as humorous but given that Twitter now appears to be an integral part of the political landscape I could imagine a scenario where it was bailed out as simply being too important (rather than too big) to fail.

I wonder if there would then be a "revenue" model in charging other governments to use it?

This has a very 'China' vibe to it.
Cut their staff by 75%, run a lean operation, stay profitable and be just an "average boring company".

Don't do anything and die a slow spectacular death.

Add more features and have their app to start competing with Snap, Facebook, WhatsApp, Medium... except I don't think they can pull this up.

I think the first choice is the best, get rid of Jack while at it, sure no Bozo CEO, but Jack needs to pick either Twitter or Square.

> Cut their staff by 75%, run a lean operation,

That would still leave them with close to 1000 employees. I wouldn't call that lean. They can cut deeper than that.

What I'd like to see: Twitter accept that they are largely done growing. Rather than chase after new users, they focus on their current users and focus on the core product. Pissed off investors dump the stocks, the share price plummets, and the founders take Twitter private.
Sounds good to me, the user!
payment and shopping integration and processing, higher quality video, expanded broadcasting, long-form content (a year ago Twitter said there were going to try longer character limits but I don't know what happened to that)

Twitter fills a niche.. it's not growing, but a pretty big one nonetheless. It's like classmates.com yahoo.com and other sites that are large, stagnant, but exist anyway because they fill a niche, have good advertising revenue, and have a lot of users.

I think it's difficult to say; my guess is endless layoffs and a slow gradual slide into irrelevancy like Yahoo! - no-one is really interested who is young at arguing with strangers online.

Do we know of any companies in tech (apart from Apple) who got big, stopped growing and managed to turn it around? Will it be an amazing purchase that saves them (like Apple did)?

Yeah! But...how hard is it to cut it down to real bare-bones staff and still somehow manage to have $120M in revenue and way less costs? Or is it mostly server and processing costs from how real-time their platform is?
"But...how hard is it to cut it down to real bare-bones staff"

I'm sure you'd lay off the right people but it's much much more difficult than you think because everyone appears to be doing stuff. Let's say 3/4 people need to go - reviewing that individually is a nightmare for morale and very time consuming.

It also never seems to happen - instead companies take the easier road and keep doing a small minimal amount of layoffs because the big one is almost impossible and might lead to whole pieces of the site stopping working.

Even if you layoff the right people, morale of the others is going to suffer and you're likely to lose 10%+ of them too.
While it is probably the sanest objective in terms of "let's be real and honest about it", 120M or even ten time that is not going to cut it with their current situation as a tech unicorn getting to the end of their ride and trying to stop their valuation from melting.

For reference, They were still valued in the 30+ billions range mid-2015, and now barely hold above 10B.