Twitter, Elon Musk, and dignity

A lot has been said about Elon Musk's actions at Twitter. I will add a little more, with some ideas that I have not seen anywhere else. (Also, I recognize that Musk has stepped aside and is letting Linda Yaccarino run the show. But I don't know if Musk is still involved.)

Musk's behavior at Twitter has been described as chaotic, petulant, and just plain wrong. He has made decisions with wide-sweeping actions, and made them hastily and with little respect for the long-time employees at Twitter. Those decisions have had consequences.

I'm going to focus not on the decisions, and not on the consequences, but on the process. Musk is running Twitter as if it were a start-up, a company with an idea of a product or service, perhaps a prototype or minimum viable product, and few or no customers. Start-ups need to find a product or service that resonates with customers, something that makes customers ready to pay for the product or service. It is common for a start-up to try several (sometimes quite varied) approaches.

A start-up looking for its product (or its value proposition, to use MBA-speak) needs to move quickly. It has limited resources and it does not have the luxury of waiting for multiple levels of bureaucracy to review decisions and slowly reach a consensus. The CEO must make decisions quickly and with minimal delay.

That's the behavior I see in Musk at Twitter: unilateral, arbitrary decisions made with no advance notice.

While such behavior is good (and sometimes necessary) at start-ups, it is not good at established companies. Established companies are, well, established. They have well-defined products and services. They have a base of customers who pay them money on a regular basis. Those customers have expectations, based on the previous actions of the company.

Arbitrary changes to products and services, made on short notice, do not sit well with those customers. Customers want predictability, just as you and I want predictability from our internet providers and streaming services.

(Note to self: a future column might discuss consistency and predictability for streaming services.)

Back to customers of Twitter: They want predictability, and Musk is not providing it.

The users of Twitter, distinct from the customers who pay for advertising, also want consistency and predictability. Arbitrary changes can drive users away, which reduces advertising view counts, which reduces advertising rates, which reduces income for advertising.

It seems to me that Musk is well-suited to run a start-up, and poorly suited to run an established company.

(Note to self: a future column might discuss the transition from start-up to established company.)

Perhaps the best action that Musk can take is to remove himself from the management of Twitter and let others run the company. He has done that, to some extent. He should step completely aside. I'm not commenting on Yaccarino's competency to run Twitter; that is another topic.

Sometimes the best way to solve a problem is to let others handle it.

More Twitter

Elon Musk has made quite the controversy, with his latest actions at Twitter (namely, terminating employment of a large number of employees, terminating the contracts for a large number of contractors, and discontinuing many of Twitter's services). His decisions have been almost universally derided; it seems that the entire internet is against him.

Let's take a contrarian position. Let's assume -- for the moment -- that Musk knows what he is doing, and that he has good reasons for his actions. Why would he take those actions, and what is his goal?

The former is open to speculation. My thought is that Twitter is losing money (it is) and is unable to fill the gap between income and "outgo" with investments. Thus, Twitter must raise revenue or reduce spending, or some combination of both. While this fits with Musk's actions, it may or may not be his motivation. 

The question of Musk's goal may be easier to answer. His goal is to improve the performance of Twitter, making it profitable and either keeping the company or selling it. (We can rule out the goal of destroying the company.) Keeping Twitter gives Musk a large communication channel to lots of people (free advertising for Tesla?) and makes him a notable figure in the tech (software) community. If Musk can "turn Twitter around" (that is, make it profitable, whether he keeps it or sells it) he builds on his reputation as a capable business leader.

Reducing the staff at Twitter has two immediate effects. The first is obvious: reduced expenses. The second is less obvious: a smaller company with fewer teams, and therefore more responsive. Usually, a smaller organization can make decisions faster than a large one, and can act faster than a large one.

It is true that a lot of "institutional knowledge" can be lost with large decreases in staff. That knowledge can range from the design of Twitter's core software, its databases, and its processes for updates, and its operations (keeping the site running). Yet a lot of knowledge can be stored in software (and database structures), and read by others if the software is well-written.

I'm not ready to bury Twitter just yet. Musk may be able to make Twitter profitable and keep a commanding presence in the tech space.

But I'm also not ready to build on top of Twitter. Musk's effort may fail, and Twitter may fail. I'm taking a cautious approach, using it for distributing and collecting and non-critical information. 

Twitter

Elon Musk has bought Twitter and started making changes. Lots of people have commented on the changes. Here are my thoughts.

Musk's actions are radical and seem reckless. (At least, they seem reckless to me.) Dissolving the board, terminating employment of senior managers, demanding that employees work 84-hour weeks to quickly implement a new feature (a fee for the blue 'authenticated' checkmark), and threatening to terminate the employment of employees who don't meet performance metrics are no way to win friends -- although it may influence people.

Musk may think that running Twitter is similar to running his other companies. But Tesla, SpaceX, The Boring Company are quite different from Twitter.

Twitter has a number of components. It has software: the various clients that provide Twitter to devices and PCs, the database of tweets, the query routines that select the tweets to show to individuals, and advertising inventory (ads) and the functions that inject those ads into the viewed streams.

But notice that the database of tweets is not made by Twitter. It is made by Twitter's users. It is the user base that creates the tweets, not Twitter employees. (Nor are they mined from the ground or grown on trees.)

The risk that Twitter now faces is one of reputation. If the quality (or the perceived quality) of Twitter falls, people (users) will leave. And like all social media, the value of Twitter is mostly defined by how many other people are on the service. Facebook's predecessor MySpace knows this, as does MySpace's predecessor Friendster.

Social media is like a telephone. A telephone is useful when lots of people have them. If you were the only person on Earth with a phone, it would be useless to you. (Who could you call?) The more people who use Twitter, the more valuable it is.

Musk's actions are damaging Twitter's reputation. A number of people have already closed their accounts, and more a claiming to do so in the future. (Those future closures haven't occurred, and it is possible that those individuals will decide to stay on Twitter.)

As I see it, Twitter has technical problems (all companies do) but their larger issues are management and leadership issues. Musk may have made some unforced errors that will drive away users, advertisers, employees, and future investors.

Twitter's mistake

Twitter this week decided to stop feeding tweets to LinkedIn. They still allow LinkedIn to feed tweets to Twitter. I think that these moves are mistakes for Twitter. 

When providers of competing services cooperate, the race is to the bottom. That is, to the foundational level, the lowest layer of the system. Microsoft and IBM have been circling each other for years, attempting to cooperate on authentication services. Microsoft is willing to make RACF work with ActiveDirectory, as long as RACF is the authoritative source and ActiveDirectory is merely a client. Microsoft, in turn, is willing to make ActiveDirectory work with RACF, as long as ActiveDirectory is the authoritative source and RACF is the client. Both IBM and Microsoft want to be the base for authentication and are unwilling to yield that position to another.

Similar dances occur in the virtualization world. Microsoft is willing to host Linux in its environments (run by a Windows hypervisor) but is not willing to let Windows run on a foreign hypervisor. (In this specific situation, the dance is asymmetric, as Linux is more than happy to host others or run as a client.)

Twitter, in its move to kick out LinkedIn, has gotten the dance backwards. By turning off the feed to LinkedIn, it has removed itself from the bottom of the hierarchy. (Perhaps "center" is a better description of the desired position among social networks. Let's change our term.)

Twitter and LinkedIn compete, in some sense, in the social network realm. They have different client bases (although with a lot of overlap) and they have different execution models. Twitter users send short (hopefully pithy) blurbs to their followers. LinkedIn users describe themselves and look for business opportunities. Yet both sets of users look for attention, and both Twitter and LinkedIn compete for eyeballs to feed to advertisers.

Okay, that last sentence was a bit more picturesque than I expected. But let's press on.

As I see it, social networks live in an ocean of competitors. They cannot exist on their own -- witness Microsoft's "Live" network that is closed to others. I visit from time to time, but only because I need the Microsoft LiveID. It seems a lonely place.

Social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn tolerate each other. From LinkedIn, I can post messages to my LinkedIn and my Twitter networks. With the Seesmic app, I can post messages to Facebook and Twitter. Sometimes I post a message on only one network; it depends on the tone and content of the message.

The best place for a social network is the center of a person's attention. (This is a game of attention, after all.) Twitter's move pushes me out of Twitter and encourages me to spend more time in LinkedIn, sending messages to LinkedIn and occasionally Twitter. The odds of me sending a Twitter-only message are less than before.

And that's why I think it was a mistake for Twitter.

The tweet is more powerful than the sword

People are surprised that companies respond quickly to complaints and questions posted to them on Twitter.

I find the rapid response predictable, once you think about it.

E-mails are, for the most part, one-to-one messages. A complaint e-mail especially so. I'm not going to CC: friends on a complaint e-mail to my bank, or my insurance company, because that simply loads their inboxes with clutter. An e-mail is a private conversation between you and the company. The company can delay response or ignore it completely at practically no cost.

Tweets, on the other hand, are a one-to-many message. They are not a letter to a friend (or business) but are published to many people. They are viewed by one's followers, and some people have hundreds of thousands of followers.

If Twitter were that simple, then companies could evaluate the importance of the Tweeter and answer only those tweets from users with large followings.

But it's more complex. All tweets are part of the TwitterStream, and anyone can look at any message (just about). I recently tweeted about my bank and used a hashtag to identify them. The bank was not following me (and is still not following me, from what I can tell) but they found the message anyway, and responded. Tweets are public postings, messages published to potentially the entire world. Tweets with hashtags are advertisements, not approved by the marketing department.

With messages going out to the globe, a company has no choice but to respond, and respond quickly. If they don't, the next tweet might just be "hey, #companyX ignored my tweet. is anyone home?", which translates to more negative advertising.

I think every company, organization, and government office should be watching the TwitterStream for messages about themselves. You want to know what people are saying about you.