ajc-sorin

A quick glance at Twitter's 2016 Annual report: 2016 Revenue: 2.5B 2015 Revenue: 2.2B 2014 Revenue: 1.4B 2013 Revenue: 660m

In the past 2 years, Revenue almost doubled. Over 700m gets spent on R&D each year - if they cut that they become profitable day 1.

The article says "by all metrics Twitter has failed," but only quoted the lagging (buy still positive) rate of new users and declining stock price.

The may have missed opportunities, but to say Twitter "failed" or "Doesn't have a business model" is ignorant of the financial facts: Twitter could cut R&D investment, stop acquiring companies or building features and have a return on assets almost 50% greater than Facebook's. Twitter may not be as 'profitable' as Facebook, but it sure as hell uses its assets better.

It does seem like Twitter is starting to reach an upward cap on its virality. If management doubles down on making a well-oiled machine instead of trying to be the next Facebook, they could be a great dividend investment. This isn't sexy, but it's definitely an enviable position.

I think he's saying that not having an opt-in/out feature would show FF's dedication towards privacy, but if they are going to have an Opt-feature, Opt-in is better than opt-out.

I know most people on this aren't a fan of the subreddit /r/The_Donald, but there is a tremendous push on that sub for people to use alternatives to major tech giants.

Google, Facebook, and Amazon (due to the connection with Washington Post) are vilified, and multiple posts reach the top each week outlining alternatives - Duckduckgo is a major one, firefox/brave are suggested browsers, and in general people on that sub talk about completely disconnecting from facebook, or minimizing use to messenger only.

I can see a pretty sizeable opportunity for platforms to come out that are truly tolerant of all speech/perspectives. I'm not criticizing, nor expressing favor towards, any of the services I've mentioned, but it seems like someone could make a solid earning in a lifestyle company aimed at servicing individuals who want privacy and uninhibited freedom of speech.

For reference, T_D is in the top 125 of subreddits by subscriber base and activity. If you exclude default subreddits, they're probably in the top 50 subs. Considering they probably have even more penetration through the amount of lurkers (like me), I wouldn't be surprised if they drove a sizeable chunk of users away from Big-Tech.

Edit (for personal reasons): I'm not on T_D because I support Trump. I go there to get a perspective of people who I don't completely understand, in order to better understand their needs/fears. Also, their memes are dank.

It'd be more accurate to state "dozens of industries fail to adapt to the needs of Milennials."

Businesses serve consumers - not the other way around. Perhaps if businesses realized this, they wouldn't be getting "killed."

I came here to mention this, but thank you for doing so already - and providing sources!

One thing I would suggest you may want to add for clarification: certain agents of corporations have fiduciary responsibilities to act in the best interest of the shareholder, which generally means to not lose money. So while "maximizing" shareholder value has no legal basis, increasing shareholder value year over year is a legal responsibility, although this is definitely a gray area.

Because it's super easy to buy and hold Bitcoin, if it becomes more popular the value of mining rigs will increase. Right now, there's probably no material difference between buying the coin itself or buying the rig and mining, but eventually, it may become more pronounced.

There are other benefits as well. Buying the mining rig is a sort of hedge in that if bitcoin drops to $0, you at least have some hardware that can be re-purposed/sold.

The seemingly lack of intelligence isn't due to them being ineffective, but rather being effective at a task you weren't necessarily evaluating.

The key difference between marketing and advertising is that marketing is advertising with the added intent of creating a sale to the person viewing the advertisement - advertising directly to their target market.

Advertising is more about brand awareness and viral marketing. You bought a pool filter and won't need one for another year, but you probably have friends/live near/know people who may be in the market for a pool filter, and if they ask you about buying one, the brand awareness may encourage you to suggest that brand, even though you may not have used it yet or no anything else about other brands - which is another key benefit.

Essentially, advertising has a 2-tier benefit. Firstly, it solidifies brand awareness, and secondly, it takes up space that would have gone to a competitor. Now the cost of competing is that much higher, because in order to get your business a competitor would need to invest in a superior product and invest in bringing awareness to you.

"If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing it's stupid."

On a slight tangent, I find it interesting the contrast the author paints between poetry and math. Perhaps it was unintentional, but it saddens me to hear or read people discuss math as if it were some polar opposite of the arts (or in this article, poetry).

Math, physics, biology, the 'hard' sciences, all have so much more in common with the arts than we give credit. Is a math proof not poetic in its own right? Does a well structured musical composition not engage with our most innate neurology on a microscopic level?

What's sad to me is that we seem to silo people into one of the two camps, which is like locking someone in a room in search of a key that's in the room next door. Businesses do this too - how many engineers get brought on to learn marketing? How many chefs learn the chemistry which serves as a foundation for every recipe they cook?

I say this as a former political-science-major-turned-accountant. I loved tax policy, but struggled to understand the law and treatment of certain issues, so I switched to accounting and found that the same logical, rational work that goes into formulating a political argument can be applied to rationalize control processes or budgeting in businesses. I've tried to un-learn my bias against people who majored in the "soft" sciences and strive to make more of an effort to understand how they think and what drives them.