back to article Twitter boss ‘personally’ grateful as five Twitter execs walk

Jack Dorsey waved goodbye to five senior Twitter execs over the weekend, and didn’t disappoint avid company-watchers when he issued yet another memo worthy of Oscar Wilde. Engineering boss Alex Roetter, HR chief Skip Schipper, media head Katie Stanton and product head Kevin Weil have “all chosen to leave the company”, Dorsey …

  1. Lysenko

    If losing one exec could be characterised as unfortunate inadequate, and two as carelessness promising, we’re not quite sure how to describe losing four – hang on – five, over one weekend.

    Four: Definitely Encouraging

    Five: Clearly Serious

    Whatever you think Twitter and its Twits, what is not in question is that it is a gaping abyss where money goes to die. The 8% of staff who were axed previously were not responsible for that. Either the problem is the senior management or else the whole business model is flawed. My money is on the latter, but either way a "twilight of the suits" was overdue.

    1. Charlie Clark Silver badge

      I wonder what the severance terms were? Don't normal employees just get a damp handshake and asked to clear their desks? But I'm sure it's a bit more if you make it to exec. Suggestions, please.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Mushroom

        execs get more

        > But I'm sure it's a bit more if you make it to exec. Suggestions, please.

        At the Exec Level, you get to partner with Jack Dorsey day and night -- get your mind out of the gutter, please! -- and then he gets to rate the experience.

      2. DouglasB

        Depending on base salary and years employed, U.S. 'C' level executives will conservatively get $.5-1.2m severance, plus most will have $300k+ in gifted stock. Their options are likely worthless. They will have a $3-4m corporate subsidized home on the S.F. peninsula, which will be sold if they move. Half of them will semi-retire after being spit out by the machine, half will have a sociopathic tendency that will compel them to work because they were born to lead or god had greater things intended for them.

    2. Naselus

      "the whole business model is flawed"

      Since when did Twitter have a business model? Just about the only monetization strategy that seems workable for it is to sell itself to a wealthy benefactor who can afford to top it up with an extra few million dollars a year and wants the prestige of owning something lots of people use. Every other attempt they've come up with has been a horrible failure because twitter really doesn't do enough to be worth spending money on. Tweets are too short to convey useful information, so their economic value is close to zero.

    3. Mpeler
      Coat

      I wonder who's Messinger now

      "CTO Adam Messinger takes on engineering and consumer product, design and research, user services and Fabric."

      If they let him go, would that be, erm, shooting the Messinger?

      (OK, I'm aff...)

  2. Mike Shepherd

    "...another memo worthy of Oscar Wilde"

    I've never seen a tweet. It's clear that our social spheres have been very different.

    1. frank ly
      Coat

      Re: "...another memo worthy of Oscar Wilde"

      The unreadable in pursuit of the unprofitable.

      "I will be partnering with him day and night ..."

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Flawed Business Model

    The twits have always been ashamed of their core narcissism, and want to pretend there is any other relevance to the platform. If they embraced that selfishness and me-ism, they might have a chance.

    1. Gene Cash Silver badge

      Re: Flawed Business Model

      > The twits have always been ashamed of their core narcissism

      "Of course I talk to myself! It's the only way to get an intelligent conversation around here!"

    2. James 51

      Re: Flawed Business Model

      Twitter has its uses. Once when my flight was delayed it was the fastest and easiest way to get a hold of customer services.

      1. Charlie Clark Silver badge
        Thumb Down

        Re: Flawed Business Model

        Twitter has its uses. Once when my flight was delayed it was the fastest and easiest way to get a hold of customer services.

        Doesn't that read like an indictment of the airlines customer services? What about those who hadn't shared their flight details with Twitter or didn't have a data connection or even a phone?

        Twitter gets lots of praise for its scalability but it's really quite pathetic when put up against what the Telco's SMS-Cs pump 24/7.

        1. James 51

          Re: Flawed Business Model

          I agree it doesn't look (and isn't) good. The people on the ground didn't know any more than the rest of the public. However if you can get something trending it might force a company to do something rather than endure the negative publicity.

          1. Charlie Clark Silver badge

            Re: Flawed Business Model

            However if you can get something trending it might force a company to do something rather than endure the negative publicity.

            So, you're stuck at airport-in-the-middle-of-nowhere venting your spleen about the delay on the interwebs. And this helps how exactly? The vague hope that company X, for reasons of PR, will notice and try and placate you by giving the local staff a kick up the backside? Dream on. Me, I prefer to speak softly to local representatives with the firm threat of legal action if statutory obligations are not fulfilled.

            As long as customer service can be considered optional, companies will try to avoid it.

            1. nsld

              Re: Flawed Business Model

              You would be the sunburnt bloke in Malaga shouting loudly and sticking an O on the end of every word to get your point across to the Spanish speaking staff!

              Using twitter or any other social media as a channel is not avoiding customer service, in fact its opening up channels to people who may not be able to communicate locally.

              Unless you want to call a local number and speak local at great expense on your mobile phone the next time you are in Kathmandu when the local desk agents dont have a clue what you are saying.

        2. nsld

          Re: Flawed Business Model @charlie Clark

          Welcome to the world of omnichannel support.

          Most CS operations use traditional channels like phone and email as well as Social Media.

          From an ops perspective one staffer can monitor and run with near real time multi channel coverage as opposed to telephony or live chat on a singular basis.

          The public nature of social media along with the ratings and medals awarded by the platforms for speed of response make it something companies endevour to act on more quickly than something like email.

          Like it or loathe it, the omnichannel support experience isnt going away.

          1. Charlie Clark Silver badge
            FAIL

            Re: Flawed Business Model @charlie Clark

            The public nature of social media along with the ratings and medals awarded by the platforms for speed of response make it something companies endevour to act on more quickly than something like email.

            When my flight is delayed I don't give a flying fuck about ratings and medals on <insert-platform-here/>, I want to be looked after properly at the airport. It's a fundamental error to confuse PR on social media with customer service.

            Thank god we have obligatory minimum standards for delayed flights in Europe!

      2. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

        Re: Flawed Business Model

        "it was the fastest and easiest way to get a hold of customer services."

        But maybe not as firmly as you might have hoped?

  4. breakfast Silver badge

    As someone who likes Twitter best of the Social networks and uses it a lot, I have no idea how they imagine they will make money from it and I don't think they really know either.

    They've got a lot of users, but I doubt they'd keep them if they bumped the service around too much to get pointless adverts in for everyone to ignore.

    At some point someone on the investment side is going to realise that having users doesn't mean automatic money and a lot of companies are going to evaporate in a puff of debt.

    1. Lysenko

      One solution...

      ...might be to charge Corporates and (especially) Politicians membership/usage fees. They've got a critical mass of customers/voters and they're giving away all this free advertising and customer support. The US Election cycle alone (hell, Donald Trump alone) could probably kick them into the black.

    2. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

      I have no idea how they imagine they will make money from it and I don't think they really know either.

      It's not obvious? Twitter has very successfully sold a dream to investors. Gannett had a little story on this the other day: at their current run rate, Twitter can continue to exist for centuries on the money they already have. They have a lot of debt, but it's quite a bit less than their capital (something like $1.2B in long-term debt versus about $4B in capital).

      And there's ample room for cost-cutting. Dorsey may be starting at the top, but I bet there are plenty of folks who aren't keeping the servers running.

      Eventually the investors will get bored and the execs will tire of it and it'll slowly crash and burn. But it's already successful, on its own terms. Twitter is its own product and it sold itself quite dearly.

  5. fedoraman

    The price of Free is ...

    Not being able to make any money in a place where everything has traditionally been free (as in beer and speech).

    A bit like Douglas Adams' observation about hitch-hikers in The Guide - "so your business strategy is to identify the one group of people who, by definition, have no money - and try and sell to them"

  6. Aquilus

    Patience

    They should stop trying to "build experiences" whatever the fuck that means and just work to maximise the number of people venting their daily brainthinks into their vast database.

    Natural language big data semantic analysis AI bollocks is coming on quick and it'll be worth far more to have a dataset of how a vast chunk of humanity thinks, than the peanuts they're trying to extract with ham fisted early-monetisation advertising bullshit.

    The golden eggs are still gestating.

    1. Zork-1

      Re: Patience

      Problems is those twits are mostly written in unnatural language(s) that non-twitter users will not understand.

      Disclaimer : I used tw(i/a)tter for under 2 hours and decided it was not worth my life with. :P

    2. Naselus

      Re: Patience

      "They should stop trying to "build experiences" whatever the fuck that means and just work to maximise the number of people venting their daily brainthinks into their vast database."

      I'm pretty sure that's how they got to where they are now tbh. They should quit doing both things and try thinking about how to convert their substantial userbase into revenue.

      Also, 'early monetization'? The company has been running at a loss for a decade and has half a billion users. If that's still larval stage, then when the hell is the right time to monetize?

    3. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

      Re: Patience

      There's plenty of NLP analysis done on tweets already. It's been one of the most common targets for sentiment analysis for a while. It's of some use, but it competes with lots of other corpora. Twitter itself is not well-placed to extract any great financial advantage from its data stream.

      Twitter is a machine for extracting money from investors. It sold a fantasy for a healthy profit. Now Dorsey's milking a little more out of it, because why not?, but there will never be any triumphant monetization of Twitter.

  7. allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

    "Whatever you think Twitter and its Twits, what is not in question is that it is a gaping abyss where money goes to die." - Lysenko

    By now I'm inclined to think that's actually Twitter's business plan. A dadaistic prank of global proportions.

    1. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

      "Prank" is too generous. These days, Twitter's business plan is "ha ha, you gave us a lot of money".

      Originally, it was "Hey, a lot of people have thrown together SMS-web gateways. Let's see if there's any demand for a public one."

      Then it became "Eh, screw SMS. It seems lots of people just want to broadcast every halfassed thought. Let's sign up a bunch of them and maybe we can make some money out of that somehow."

      Then it turned into "I don't know - try advertising?".

      When web advertising became a race to the bottom dominated by Google's lead, reputation, and clever use of random reinforcement to produce obsessive behavior in ad-buyers, Twitter's business plan turned into "Investors! We offer an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is." And that one worked pretty well.

      Now they've entered the era of "Render off all the lovely fat."

  8. Florida1920

    Reading Tweets =

    Existential boredom.

  9. David Roberts
    Windows

    Disaster waiting to happen?

    Twitter is so popular - and so fast - that more and more companies are basing their Customer Service front end around it.

    The Police are also heavily into Twitter.

    Vast numbers of people (meeja doncher know) make a career of running Twitter feeds.

    The only people not really on board with this is Twitter, who is not really benefiting financially from all this free love and communication.

    Perhaps it is time to charge everyone $1 p/a for a Twitter account, and charge listed companies $10 p/a.

    Then you either get a billion dollar revenue stream or you prove that you are never going to make money and stop wasting your time (well, the people working for Twitter must be getting money from somewhere so perhaps stop wasting VC money........oh, hang on, leeching off the amoral........ as you were, then.....)

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