[logicallee]

>This is a great example of how a company was undone [...] , if Twitter went along with their founders vision it could have been much bigger over time

For anyone wondering why parent uses "undone", "could have been much bigger", at a time that Twitter is a household name, the President tweets, people hold public conversations over Twitter, and list Twitter handles instead of their emails.[1]

It's because Twitter is "only" an $11.9 billion company by market cap, whereas Facebook is at $492B or 44 times bigger. I can't think of any other metric by which Twitter isn't a resounding success story.

[1] https://levels.io/hoodmaps/ - Very bottom "I don't use email so tweet me your questions."

[ckastner]

As a metric, popularity can be misleading.

Take Hollywood, for example: few things nowadays are as ever-present as motion pictures, but the total box office revenue for 2016 was around $11bn [1]. That's about 19 days worth of revenue for Apple, going by their last quarter [2].

Just because you see it everywhere, or everyone talks about it, doesn't necessarily mean that it's a huge moneymaker.

[1] http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/2016-box-office-record...

[2] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2017/05/apple-reports-second-...

[logicallee]

I'm shocked you consider a tiny little $0.8t company like Apple to be a "huge moneymaker". Last year alone, which "hasn't been kind", just the top 25 oil companies made $2.6t in revenue¹: so what you call 19 days of revenue they made every 36 hours; in the year they made enough to buy Apple at its current market cap with its staggeringly high P/E multiple of 17.91, in its entirety 3.2 times. Just because everyone talks about them doesn't make Apple a moneymaker. Get some perspective. /s

Seriously though, I think you're being totally unreasonable. :) $11 billion is huge revenue for movies. That's not chump change.

¹ https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurengensler/2016/05/26/global...

[evgen]

If we get to lump all of big oil into one pool do we do the same for all of tech? The largest oil company, ExxonMobile, had only $3.5b more in revenue last year than Apple. Then again, you don't get to buy things with revenue, you need profit to pay for expensive baubles. Apple made as much profit in their "weak" (Q3) quarter of 2016 as Exxon made all year.

[chrisco255]

Don't you think you're comparing Apples to Exxons?

[ckastner]

The point was that popularity can be a misleading metric.

Twitter might be ubiquitous (a household name, as you said), but just like Iron Man, its popularity is not proportional to its financial success.

[logicallee]

Fair enough.