To me, Twitter is infrastructure, a mechanism used by a majority of the tech space, ubiquitous and valuable. Like Wikipedia, I can’t imagine my day-to-day workflow without Twitter.
Seems likely Twitter will shrink in value until it either becomes small enough to support its existing revenue model, or becomes just too much of an irresistible bargain for some other company.
The question is, will that eventual Twitter resemble the existing Twitter.
Fixing Twitter is easy. But to do it the entire management team has tow be relieved of their duties including jack.
Then, take the company private, get rid of the phonies and bullies and scale back the quest for endless new members.
I’ve never seen any suggestions for “get rid of the phonies and bullies” that is easy or cheap.
They just killed Vine, as well. I’m curious if that’s part of the 9% of layoffs or separate from it:
https://medium.com/@vine/important-news-about-vine-909c5f4ae7a7#.19pev8asn
“The question is, will that eventual Twitter resemble the existing Twitter.”
Twitter went from “social” to “broadcast” years ago.
Useful for corporate PR, pop stars, billionaire amateur politicians.
Deadly to traditional “journalism”.
So it already has evolved beyond its “social” infancy.
But I don’t think it will go much beyond where it is at the moment.
Another vector for the already-famous to build on their fame.
Another source of infotainment.
If Twitter disappeared overnight, we’d all be just fine.
I wouldn’t be surprised if this is just the first wave of more layoffs. 3860 employees before this latest layoff. WTF are all those people doing?
Development? No. Only a few dozen needed.
Marketing? If they are, it isn’t helping.
Sales? What do they have to sell?
It’s a mystery to me.
Remember App.net?
The social network “for the rest of us”?
What ever happened to them?
(I had two paid accounts on their service.)
Not enough subscribers renewed after their first year and the company couldn’t afford to keep their talent. It still exists, but it’s a shadow of its former self. Lots of discussion about what caused the collapse (I still subscribe to the theory that letting anyone make a free account that could post as much as it wanted had a negative impact on the culture as spam flooded the global channel, filling it with noise, and segregating the population into groups of people that already knew everyone in the group).
What makes you so certain that your numbers are correct for the number of staff needed for development? Remember that Twitter is a MASSIVE service, with millions of users. I’m not a web development expert, but I bet the number of people necessary to keep things running smoothly are higher than you realize.
As for marketing, you’re quite correct, it seems unlikely that there is a need for a large marketing team, which is probably where the largest percentage of cuts came from (sans Vine, of course).
Sales, however, is a different story. While Twitter does not sell a product, it does sell ads. The size of that team is probably too large, and was also probably a good chunk of those cut today.