Regarding Twitter, its been entertaining, but on balance I come down more on the side of Elon. Too many tech companies burn other people's cash and have no prospect of actually making money. I'm not surprised that Twitter employees are mournful if so many of them are paid so much with great working conditions and packages from a business that burns investor cash doing so.
Elon is a 17 year-old boy with grand visions for the future. So he can be ruthless with his vision of colonising Mars, but still likes to party and finds fart noises funny. Much of the Twitter chaos is a result of him not doing detail. Once he finds someone to run a slimmed down Twitter it will be fine.
There's another aspect to all of this that's worth considering:
Many web-facing companies such as Meta/Alphabet rely on a finite amount of advertising resources for much of their revenue. It is not a brilliant business model when an economic crisis occurs and companies/orgs reduce their advertising budget.
Yet we, the great unwashed public, like using services that are free. I don't directly pay to use Google or Facebook. They do not directly get any revenue from me. And if they asked for a monthly or annual fee, I would probably leave the platform (Google would be hard to leave, admittedly). We have sold our data, and our souls, to save a few quid a month. It's a trade-off many do not mind.
Musk is probably right in trying to get Twitter users to pay for the service, as it gives another income stream. The problem is that people do not like paying for something they have got for free. It was free before, why do I have to pay now?
So a company really needs to start off charging users from the beginning, even if those charges are small. Yet a small company that charges when others do not, will find it hard to grow.
Is this an issue with the entire social Internet sector? The potential revenue pot is mostly limited to advertising because someone will always offer an alternative free service, as it is so easy to set one up?
(Apols for the rambling; I have not had enough coffee yet.)
Free services I couldn't face living without: 1. Wikipedia, 2. Google, 3. ...that's it
(and even Google is just habitual, Bing or others would probably do as well).
Edit: Oops, sorry: 3. PB obvs!
I use Bing and Google every day. Google is better but Bing does the job most of the time.
Time for a courageous politician who will be listened to to announce that Brexit is costing the UK £40 billion each year and will continue to do so.
This is £32 billion more than we were paying into the EU for services as advertised on the Red Bus. It is causing the country genuine hardship from which we are unlikely to recover.
Ideally the person announcing their Damascene conversion will be a respected Brexiteer. The likes of Lord Wolfson of Next won't cut it. It needs to be someone who would command all the front pages and would lead the news for days.
It needs to be someone who would open the floodgates,
Boris would be ideal. Even Cummings would be a possibility. Gove is considered a heavyweight intellectual by Tories so he might do. But it has to be done quickly and the narrative could change overnight. A new mood of optimism could sweep the country
Good luck with that one. The problem of course is that Brexit as such is an absolute and binary choice. You are either in or not in the EU. The absoluteness of this is clear from the failure pre-2016 to negotiate even a simulacrum of a derogation from FOM, the one issue which would have turned around the result.
And, as the result 52/48 showed there is no clear consensus behind either of those two choices, nor is there going to be.
EEA/EFTA or another version of remaining in the SM always was the only solution in 2016 and it still is.
It remains the case of course that it is complete social folly to insist that frictionless free trade in goods and services must entail frictionless free trade in people. The UK are complicit of course in agreeing to this folly in the first place.
Morning all! The morning after the night before, and we're all waking up with a massive hangover from a 6 year bender that a majority of voters hadn't accepted was such.
As others have pointed out up-thread, the unique to the UK factor is Brexit. It has consumed our politics for 10 years and we're permanently economically and politically poorer because of it. Remaining people who are still off their tits insist all is good, but the facts - economic data that can no longer be denied or excused - now clearly disprove them.
Straws in the wind on Question Time
Conservative MP Victoria Atkins tells #bbcqt audience to ‘move on’ because Brexit “happened six years ago”.
There's another aspect to all of this that's worth considering:
Many web-facing companies such as Meta/Alphabet rely on a finite amount of advertising resources for much of their revenue. It is not a brilliant business model when an economic crisis occurs and companies/orgs reduce their advertising budget.
Yet we, the great unwashed public, like using services that are free. I don't directly pay to use Google or Facebook. They do not directly get any revenue from me. And if they asked for a monthly or annual fee, I would probably leave the platform (Google would be hard to leave, admittedly). We have sold our data, and our souls, to save a few quid a month. It's a trade-off many do not mind.
Musk is probably right in trying to get Twitter users to pay for the service, as it gives another income stream. The problem is that people do not like paying for something they have got for free. It was free before, why do I have to pay now?
So a company really needs to start off charging users from the beginning, even if those charges are small. Yet a small company that charges when others do not, will find it hard to grow.
Is this an issue with the entire social Internet sector? The potential revenue pot is mostly limited to advertising because someone will always offer an alternative free service, as it is so easy to set one up?
(Apols for the rambling; I have not had enough coffee yet.)
Free services I couldn't face living without: 1. Wikipedia, 2. Google, 3. ...that's it
(and even Google is just habitual, Bing or others would probably do as well).
Edit: Oops, sorry: 3. PB obvs!
And Wikipedia has a (fairly effective) voluntary monetization approach; rather like the UK museum sector, you can bung it some cash if you have it on one of your visits, and they make it easy to do so.
It remains the case of course that it is complete social folly to insist that frictionless free trade in goods and services must entail frictionless free trade in people. The UK are complicit of course in agreeing to this folly in the first place.
Hundreds upon hundreds of Twitter employees have technically resigned but still have access to Twitter’s internal systems, with some speculating it is because the employees tasked with managing that access also resigned. https://twitter.com/alexeheath/status/1593431420587761664
Swedish Prosecutor Mats Ljungqvist, who leads the ongoing preliminary investigation, confirms that the detonations at the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines were grave sabotage. - Analyses show traces of explosives on several of the incongruous objects that were found, he says
Regarding Twitter, its been entertaining, but on balance I come down more on the side of Elon. Too many tech companies burn other people's cash and have no prospect of actually making money. I'm not surprised that Twitter employees are mournful if so many of them are paid so much with great working conditions and packages from a business that burns investor cash doing so.
Elon is a 17 year-old boy with grand visions for the future. So he can be ruthless with his vision of colonising Mars, but still likes to party and finds fart noises funny. Much of the Twitter chaos is a result of him not doing detail. Once he finds someone to run a slimmed down Twitter it will be fine.
There's another aspect to all of this that's worth considering:
Many web-facing companies such as Meta/Alphabet rely on a finite amount of advertising resources for much of their revenue. It is not a brilliant business model when an economic crisis occurs and companies/orgs reduce their advertising budget.
Yet we, the great unwashed public, like using services that are free. I don't directly pay to use Google or Facebook. They do not directly get any revenue from me. And if they asked for a monthly or annual fee, I would probably leave the platform (Google would be hard to leave, admittedly). We have sold our data, and our souls, to save a few quid a month. It's a trade-off many do not mind.
Musk is probably right in trying to get Twitter users to pay for the service, as it gives another income stream. The problem is that people do not like paying for something they have got for free. It was free before, why do I have to pay now?
So a company really needs to start off charging users from the beginning, even if those charges are small. Yet a small company that charges when others do not, will find it hard to grow.
Is this an issue with the entire social Internet sector? The potential revenue pot is mostly limited to advertising because someone will always offer an alternative free service, as it is so easy to set one up?
(Apols for the rambling; I have not had enough coffee yet.)
Free services I couldn't face living without: 1. Wikipedia, 2. Google, 3. ...that's it
(and even Google is just habitual, Bing or others would probably do as well).
Edit: Oops, sorry: 3. PB obvs!
And Wikipedia has a (fairly effective) voluntary monetization approach; rather like the UK museum sector, you can bung it some cash if you have it on one of your visits, and they make it easy to do so.
Like the Guardian, they're reasonably persistent in asking, as well
There's another aspect to all of this that's worth considering:
Many web-facing companies such as Meta/Alphabet rely on a finite amount of advertising resources for much of their revenue. It is not a brilliant business model when an economic crisis occurs and companies/orgs reduce their advertising budget.
Yet we, the great unwashed public, like using services that are free. I don't directly pay to use Google or Facebook. They do not directly get any revenue from me. And if they asked for a monthly or annual fee, I would probably leave the platform (Google would be hard to leave, admittedly). We have sold our data, and our souls, to save a few quid a month. It's a trade-off many do not mind.
Musk is probably right in trying to get Twitter users to pay for the service, as it gives another income stream. The problem is that people do not like paying for something they have got for free. It was free before, why do I have to pay now?
So a company really needs to start off charging users from the beginning, even if those charges are small. Yet a small company that charges when others do not, will find it hard to grow.
Is this an issue with the entire social Internet sector? The potential revenue pot is mostly limited to advertising because someone will always offer an alternative free service, as it is so easy to set one up?
(Apols for the rambling; I have not had enough coffee yet.)
Google are diversifying a bit, in fairness. The bulk of revenue/income is absolutely ads, but in a field in which they are utterly dominant, and with a product that is effective (and practically essential) for brands.
But they have Cloud, Play, their Android interests, physical products like Pixel. And YouTube, while still ad-funded, is a different advertising proposition and continues to grow (and in terms of viewing hours and minutes is the single most popular video platform for under-24s; beats linear TV, subscription VoD like Netflix and broadcaster VoD. It’s a giant).
Meta seem more vulnerable to market changes, as their various attempts to diversify have largely failed so far.
Twitter is more precarious still, as even pre-Musk it sat in an odd place in the advertising ecosystem, and it’s targeting product is half a decade behind Meta’s sophisticated offering. He’s right to look at different revenue models, but probably shouldn’t be burning down the existing one first. And you’re right about payment. Oddly, folk are more apt to pay a four or five quid monthly increase to something they were already paying for, than even a pound for something they use regularly but is currently free. The psychology of pricing is interesting. For me, I assume because something is free, the value (my data) has already been exchanged and therefore I resent then *also* paying on top. That’s why I don’t think subscription will work.
Amazon of course have this all sewn up, and why Bezos is many times the business operator that Musk is - because he is relentlessly focused on the customer (and of course, wisely invested in the bedrock of the internet in AWS).
Also rambling; also in need of coffee.
Google's advertising revenue is fairly robust - it comes at the point people are actively looking for XYZ so there is a fairly quick and trackable link between advertising costs and revenue.
Meta / Twitter are very much background display advertising. The argument was often made (by both firms) that immediate success wasn't their purpose - it was about introducing the brand to the customer and / or keeping your brand in the customer's mind. And Twitter wasn't great at doing that (the number of utterly inappropriate ads was massive) but it's way worse now.
Worth saying Amazon are also cutting back - 10,000 redundancies this week. And remember a lot of Amazon workers don't actually work directly for Amazon they are just short term agency staff.
Amazon lost half its market cap this year, dropping a trillion dollars (aka its share price halved); Bezos fans, please explain. Meta (aka Facebook) is hosing money up the wall chasing Zuck's pipedream of a virtual reality metaverse. Meta used to have a virtual duopoly on online advertising (with Google) and it will be interesting to see how much remains; perhaps Meta is oversold.
Twitter could have taken the freemium path (basic product free, as now, and charge for extras) which seems to have been Musk's plan but the f'wit decided to charge for the blue tick, whose veracity underpins Twitter. What's the point of being on Twitter to follow (say) Elon Musk if you now can't be sure it really is Elon Musk?
There was a time when Tory politicians inserted brexit into every conversation triumphantly. Now none of them will even mention it, like it's a swearword.
There's another aspect to all of this that's worth considering:
Many web-facing companies such as Meta/Alphabet rely on a finite amount of advertising resources for much of their revenue. It is not a brilliant business model when an economic crisis occurs and companies/orgs reduce their advertising budget.
Yet we, the great unwashed public, like using services that are free. I don't directly pay to use Google or Facebook. They do not directly get any revenue from me. And if they asked for a monthly or annual fee, I would probably leave the platform (Google would be hard to leave, admittedly). We have sold our data, and our souls, to save a few quid a month. It's a trade-off many do not mind.
Musk is probably right in trying to get Twitter users to pay for the service, as it gives another income stream. The problem is that people do not like paying for something they have got for free. It was free before, why do I have to pay now?
So a company really needs to start off charging users from the beginning, even if those charges are small. Yet a small company that charges when others do not, will find it hard to grow.
Is this an issue with the entire social Internet sector? The potential revenue pot is mostly limited to advertising because someone will always offer an alternative free service, as it is so easy to set one up?
(Apols for the rambling; I have not had enough coffee yet.)
Free services I couldn't face living without: 1. Wikipedia, 2. Google, 3. ...that's it
(and even Google is just habitual, Bing or others would probably do as well).
Edit: Oops, sorry: 3. PB obvs!
And Wikipedia has a (fairly effective) voluntary monetization approach; rather like the UK museum sector, you can bung it some cash if you have it on one of your visits, and they make it easy to do so.
There's another aspect to all of this that's worth considering:
Many web-facing companies such as Meta/Alphabet rely on a finite amount of advertising resources for much of their revenue. It is not a brilliant business model when an economic crisis occurs and companies/orgs reduce their advertising budget.
Yet we, the great unwashed public, like using services that are free. I don't directly pay to use Google or Facebook. They do not directly get any revenue from me. And if they asked for a monthly or annual fee, I would probably leave the platform (Google would be hard to leave, admittedly). We have sold our data, and our souls, to save a few quid a month. It's a trade-off many do not mind.
Musk is probably right in trying to get Twitter users to pay for the service, as it gives another income stream. The problem is that people do not like paying for something they have got for free. It was free before, why do I have to pay now?
So a company really needs to start off charging users from the beginning, even if those charges are small. Yet a small company that charges when others do not, will find it hard to grow.
Is this an issue with the entire social Internet sector? The potential revenue pot is mostly limited to advertising because someone will always offer an alternative free service, as it is so easy to set one up?
(Apols for the rambling; I have not had enough coffee yet.)
Free services I couldn't face living without: 1. Wikipedia, 2. Google, 3. ...that's it
(and even Google is just habitual, Bing or others would probably do as well).
Edit: Oops, sorry: 3. PB obvs!
And Wikipedia has a (fairly effective) voluntary monetization approach; rather like the UK museum sector, you can bung it some cash if you have it on one of your visits, and they make it easy to do so.
Like the Guardian, they're reasonably persistent in asking, as well
Not sure why but I, who have no income and am burning through savings, always give to Wikipedia but not to the Guardian. Maybe the Guardian pleas are too intrusive. I subscribe to the Telegraph alone of all the papers, largely to follow the links Plato used to post here; FT and Bloomberg would be nice but are too expensive.
Swedish Prosecutor Mats Ljungqvist, who leads the ongoing preliminary investigation, confirms that the detonations at the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines were grave sabotage. - Analyses show traces of explosives on several of the incongruous objects that were found, he says
There's another aspect to all of this that's worth considering:
Many web-facing companies such as Meta/Alphabet rely on a finite amount of advertising resources for much of their revenue. It is not a brilliant business model when an economic crisis occurs and companies/orgs reduce their advertising budget.
Yet we, the great unwashed public, like using services that are free. I don't directly pay to use Google or Facebook. They do not directly get any revenue from me. And if they asked for a monthly or annual fee, I would probably leave the platform (Google would be hard to leave, admittedly). We have sold our data, and our souls, to save a few quid a month. It's a trade-off many do not mind.
Musk is probably right in trying to get Twitter users to pay for the service, as it gives another income stream. The problem is that people do not like paying for something they have got for free. It was free before, why do I have to pay now?
So a company really needs to start off charging users from the beginning, even if those charges are small. Yet a small company that charges when others do not, will find it hard to grow.
Is this an issue with the entire social Internet sector? The potential revenue pot is mostly limited to advertising because someone will always offer an alternative free service, as it is so easy to set one up?
(Apols for the rambling; I have not had enough coffee yet.)
Free services I couldn't face living without: 1. Wikipedia, 2. Google, 3. ...that's it
(and even Google is just habitual, Bing or others would probably do as well).
Edit: Oops, sorry: 3. PB obvs!
And Wikipedia has a (fairly effective) voluntary monetization approach; rather like the UK museum sector, you can bung it some cash if you have it on one of your visits, and they make it easy to do so.
So does PB!
PB doesn’t make anything easy. Technically it is a nightmare.
NEW Asked by Mishal if rejoining SM wd boost growth
Chancellor “having unfettered trade with our neighbours is very beneficial to growth..have great confidence that over years ahead, outside the single market, able to remove the vast majority of trade barriers between us & EU”
Suggests at margin different approach to at least try to lower some of the non tariff barriers that have arisen as a result of Boris Johnson/ Frost’s Brexit deal… businesses will be queuing up to tell them about some of the issues for traders…
Swedish Prosecutor Mats Ljungqvist, who leads the ongoing preliminary investigation, confirms that the detonations at the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines were grave sabotage. - Analyses show traces of explosives on several of the incongruous objects that were found, he says
All together now:
No. Shit. Sherlock.
Traces of explosives and a bus were found around the British economy.
Possibly. How would we know? Boris was pro-immigration. Truss was pro-immigration. Cameron let immigration boom while claiming to want it down to tens of thousands.
(and even Google is just habitual, Bing or others would probably do as well).
I am constantly surprised at Bing.
I expect it to be awful, and yet every time I use it, it's worse than I could possibly have imagined.
If i remember correctly, bing is a surprising financial success for Microsoft, because it is integrated into a lot of things you don't realise e.g. amazon Alexa.
There's another aspect to all of this that's worth considering:
Many web-facing companies such as Meta/Alphabet rely on a finite amount of advertising resources for much of their revenue. It is not a brilliant business model when an economic crisis occurs and companies/orgs reduce their advertising budget.
Yet we, the great unwashed public, like using services that are free. I don't directly pay to use Google or Facebook. They do not directly get any revenue from me. And if they asked for a monthly or annual fee, I would probably leave the platform (Google would be hard to leave, admittedly). We have sold our data, and our souls, to save a few quid a month. It's a trade-off many do not mind.
Musk is probably right in trying to get Twitter users to pay for the service, as it gives another income stream. The problem is that people do not like paying for something they have got for free. It was free before, why do I have to pay now?
So a company really needs to start off charging users from the beginning, even if those charges are small. Yet a small company that charges when others do not, will find it hard to grow.
Is this an issue with the entire social Internet sector? The potential revenue pot is mostly limited to advertising because someone will always offer an alternative free service, as it is so easy to set one up?
(Apols for the rambling; I have not had enough coffee yet.)
Free services I couldn't face living without: 1. Wikipedia, 2. Google, 3. ...that's it
(and even Google is just habitual, Bing or others would probably do as well).
Edit: Oops, sorry: 3. PB obvs!
And Wikipedia has a (fairly effective) voluntary monetization approach; rather like the UK museum sector, you can bung it some cash if you have it on one of your visits, and they make it easy to do so.
So does PB!
PB doesn’t make anything easy. Technically it is a nightmare.
Swedish Prosecutor Mats Ljungqvist, who leads the ongoing preliminary investigation, confirms that the detonations at the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines were grave sabotage. - Analyses show traces of explosives on several of the incongruous objects that were found, he says
All together now:
No. Shit. Sherlock.
Traces of explosives and a bus were found around the British economy.
NEW Asked by Mishal if rejoining SM wd boost growth
Chancellor “having unfettered trade with our neighbours is very beneficial to growth..have great confidence that over years ahead, outside the single market, able to remove the vast majority of trade barriers between us & EU”
Suggests at margin different approach to at least try to lower some of the non tariff barriers that have arisen as a result of Boris Johnson/ Frost’s Brexit deal… businesses will be queuing up to tell them about some of the issues for traders…
There's another aspect to all of this that's worth considering:
Many web-facing companies such as Meta/Alphabet rely on a finite amount of advertising resources for much of their revenue. It is not a brilliant business model when an economic crisis occurs and companies/orgs reduce their advertising budget.
Yet we, the great unwashed public, like using services that are free. I don't directly pay to use Google or Facebook. They do not directly get any revenue from me. And if they asked for a monthly or annual fee, I would probably leave the platform (Google would be hard to leave, admittedly). We have sold our data, and our souls, to save a few quid a month. It's a trade-off many do not mind.
Musk is probably right in trying to get Twitter users to pay for the service, as it gives another income stream. The problem is that people do not like paying for something they have got for free. It was free before, why do I have to pay now?
So a company really needs to start off charging users from the beginning, even if those charges are small. Yet a small company that charges when others do not, will find it hard to grow.
Is this an issue with the entire social Internet sector? The potential revenue pot is mostly limited to advertising because someone will always offer an alternative free service, as it is so easy to set one up?
(Apols for the rambling; I have not had enough coffee yet.)
Google are diversifying a bit, in fairness. The bulk of revenue/income is absolutely ads, but in a field in which they are utterly dominant, and with a product that is effective (and practically essential) for brands.
But they have Cloud, Play, their Android interests, physical products like Pixel. And YouTube, while still ad-funded, is a different advertising proposition and continues to grow (and in terms of viewing hours and minutes is the single most popular video platform for under-24s; beats linear TV, subscription VoD like Netflix and broadcaster VoD. It’s a giant).
Meta seem more vulnerable to market changes, as their various attempts to diversify have largely failed so far.
Twitter is more precarious still, as even pre-Musk it sat in an odd place in the advertising ecosystem, and it’s targeting product is half a decade behind Meta’s sophisticated offering. He’s right to look at different revenue models, but probably shouldn’t be burning down the existing one first. And you’re right about payment. Oddly, folk are more apt to pay a four or five quid monthly increase to something they were already paying for, than even a pound for something they use regularly but is currently free. The psychology of pricing is interesting. For me, I assume because something is free, the value (my data) has already been exchanged and therefore I resent then *also* paying on top. That’s why I don’t think subscription will work.
Amazon of course have this all sewn up, and why Bezos is many times the business operator that Musk is - because he is relentlessly focused on the customer (and of course, wisely invested in the bedrock of the internet in AWS).
Also rambling; also in need of coffee.
Google's advertising revenue is fairly robust - it comes at the point people are actively looking for XYZ so there is a fairly quick and trackable link between advertising costs and revenue.
Meta / Twitter are very much background display advertising. The argument was often made (by both firms) that immediate success wasn't their purpose - it was about introducing the brand to the customer and / or keeping your brand in the customer's mind. And Twitter wasn't great at doing that (the number of utterly inappropriate ads was massive) but it's way worse now.
Worth saying Amazon are also cutting back - 10,000 redundancies this week. And remember a lot of Amazon workers don't actually work directly for Amazon they are just short term agency staff.
Meta are better than that suggests - in terms of ad sequencing, retargeting and just the depth of the targeting possibilities therein make it effective for activation (i.e. clicking and doing a thing) as well as brand. In fact they're probably better for activation than brand advertising - albeit less at the point of demand that Google's search ads, but therefore better at tempting you into e.g. an impulse buy.
Twitter is essentially similar, but with a much smaller user base and a worse ad service.
Hundreds upon hundreds of Twitter employees have technically resigned but still have access to Twitter’s internal systems, with some speculating it is because the employees tasked with managing that access also resigned. https://twitter.com/alexeheath/status/1593431420587761664
Yeah, the trouble with lazily saying that Twitter (or any company) does not need 90 per cent of its workforce is that it turns out every single one of them is doing something important. Now, maybe they only do that important thing a few hours in every month, but it still needs to be done. Approving borderline expense claims, arranging for a contractor to fix a broken window or replace a lightbulb, or even managing access.
There was a time when Tory politicians inserted brexit into every conversation triumphantly. Now none of them will even mention it, like it's a swearword.
Anyone who thinks we should be grateful that “the adults are back in the room” is a forelock tugging twat.
Invariably they voted for Brexit, too.
Nah. Boris was fun but clearly preferred knockabout to governing. Truss was an ideological fanatic. Having people trying to do even the wrong thing seriously is a refreshing change, and I'm a Europhile socialist.
The oddity, though, is that Boris might have had a better chance of winning the next GE, because he reached people who don't care about the details of politics and enjoy the knockabout. I don't think there are enough voters who appreciate serious government AND are willing to vote Tory.
There was a time when Tory politicians inserted brexit into every conversation triumphantly. Now none of them will even mention it, like it's a swearword.
I don't disagree. It should be the policy of any UK government to remove barriers to trade. That does not need political union to do so.
Unless the barrier is "You need to be a member", which is not an uncommon or unrealistic position
I would pay a certain amount of money in to trade in the single market as long as the political part is not included. If the EU members want ever closer union that's up to them.
It remains the case of course that it is complete social folly to insist that frictionless free trade in goods and services must entail frictionless free trade in people. The UK are complicit of course in agreeing to this folly in the first place.
Our economy requires immigration.
The less friction, the better.
This is fact, not fiction.
Even the Brexiteers are saying this.
Yes. Agree. And now my Tanzanian friend is in the same position as a Lithuanian, whereas before he was massively discriminated against. He had to leave the UK post graduation despite getting a job and is now back.
Twitter nearly doubled its head count during the pandemic. I presume initially Elon thought that play hard ball, get the activist types out and back down to 2018 levels when it made a bit of money. But then doubled and tripled down with respect my authoooority.
The Twitter episode of the eventual Musk Netflix biopic is gonna be pretty wild.
Quite amusing browsing #twitterrip. So much hyperbole. Even our own JJ has fallen down with a severe bout of MDS.
Why is it MDS? Are you saying this is all some form of genius masterplan that we're not God-level enough to understand?
In which case, can you explain it to us? For us plebs, it just looks like an hilarious clusterf*ck of epic proportions.
Even if the servers hold up, I'd like to see an explanation of how this works financially. The extra billion a year in financing costs, for a company that was only intermittently profitable, means that even drastic cost cutting isn't going to sort things out.
And he's just sabotaged a significant amount of his ad revenue.
Having already announced that he's actively looking for a CEO to hand over the running to, how is the Musk genius going to stretch between his existing ventures and the new toy ?
Its running costs have only been about $3bn a year. If he’s succeeded in halving that for the same product offering, even with the debt interest on top that’s a pretty good cost base to grow from as they build out new revenue sources. His “hardcore” message shows he wants to build a startup culture at Twitter, which had become lazy in its approach to innovation, bloated in its operating model and without a credible plan to become long term self sustainable.
The burn it down to start again approach might not work but he’s giving a good crack and he has a good track record of forcing success.
There seems no viable alternative to Twitter up and ready to go, so he can take it to the brink and it'll survive.
I would pay a certain amount of money in to trade in the single market as long as the political part is not included. If the EU members want ever closer union that's up to them.
Those are not the current terms of membership.
Cakeism is not on the menu.
We hold none of the cards.
We can play by the rules, or stand with our noses pressed up against the windows while our economy dies.
Mr. kle4, that may be true in the immediate term but if there are a ton of ex-Twitter employees who actually made it work and the will to cretae an alternative it may not be the case for long.
Mr. kle4, that may be true in the immediate term but if there are a ton of ex-Twitter employees who actually made it work and the will to cretae an alternative it may not be the case for long.
Anyone who thinks we should be grateful that “the adults are back in the room” is a forelock tugging twat.
Invariably they voted for Brexit, too.
Nah. Boris was fun but clearly preferred knockabout to governing. Truss was an ideological fanatic. Having people trying to do even the wrong thing seriously is a refreshing change, and I'm a Europhile socialist.
The oddity, though, is that Boris might have had a better chance of winning the next GE, because he reached people who don't care about the details of politics and enjoy the knockabout. I don't think there are enough voters who appreciate serious government AND are willing to vote Tory.
Yes I'm relieved to have serious people in charge again. I thought yesterday's Autumn Statement was a serious effort at dealing with a difficult situation. I thought they were right to raise taxes on the well off and I agreed with uprating benefits in line with inflation and continuing capital investment like hs2. Hopefully their claim to be raising real terms education spending is true. I think the Tories are finished for now and deserve to be given a thorough kicking for the Brexit disaster, Osborne's austerity and the madness of Truss. But I think that Sunak-Hunt is a refreshingly serious team and I find it hard to muster any serious loathing for them. In fact I feel a bit sorry for them and wish them luck.
Regarding Twitter, its been entertaining, but on balance I come down more on the side of Elon. Too many tech companies burn other people's cash and have no prospect of actually making money. I'm not surprised that Twitter employees are mournful if so many of them are paid so much with great working conditions and packages from a business that burns investor cash doing so.
Elon is a 17 year-old boy with grand visions for the future. So he can be ruthless with his vision of colonising Mars, but still likes to party and finds fart noises funny. Much of the Twitter chaos is a result of him not doing detail. Once he finds someone to run a slimmed down Twitter it will be fine.
Twitter had made a profit recently. People I know who work IT Ops are not expecting twitter to last the month. They're losing too many people necessary to keep it running.
Fundamentally Musk did not understand the business he bought and as a result he's going to destroy it.
I would pay a certain amount of money in to trade in the single market as long as the political part is not included. If the EU members want ever closer union that's up to them.
Those are not the current terms of membership.
Cakeism is not on the menu.
We hold none of the cards.
We can play by the rules, or stand with our noses pressed up against the windows while our economy dies.
The single market won't solve all our problems. Personally I think something like the EEA works in this regard. Is Norway pressed up against the glass while its economy dies? Its rather early for hyperbole!
For those wondering, due to a fantastic lack of backing stuff up (I'm a bit more up to date with actual work stuff, fortunately) I've lost pretty much all my betting records for the year.
However, from memory, I was still ahead by a fair margin overall on the five football leagues' betting (£300 or so with £10 per bet) and the last set, after two dreadful rounds, was moderately green.
May or may not bother writing up F1 blogs for the last race.
Speaking of which, the Dracula of F1 has returned. Again. Hulkenberg's going to Haas next year.
(and even Google is just habitual, Bing or others would probably do as well).
I am constantly surprised at Bing.
I expect it to be awful, and yet every time I use it, it's worse than I could possibly have imagined.
Still weirdly has about 10-15% of the search market.
It's the default for people who buy systems with Windows, and the differences from Google etc. are not immediately perceptible. My subjective impression is that it's a bit less good at finding stuff, but I quite like that they donate a tiny sum to a charity I support for every search I make, so I don't bother to change. I'm sure there are much more serious assessments out there but I'm a casual user of search engines, as are most people.
Also, I use some translation software that is optimised for Bing and works badly with Firefox and Chrome. Maybe there's more like that out there?
For those wondering, due to a fantastic lack of backing stuff up (I'm a bit more up to date with actual work stuff, fortunately) I've lost pretty much all my betting records for the year.
However, from memory, I was still ahead by a fair margin overall on the five football leagues' betting (£300 or so with £10 per bet) and the last set, after two dreadful rounds, was moderately green.
May or may not bother writing up F1 blogs for the last race.
Speaking of which, the Dracula of F1 has returned. Again. Hulkenberg's going to Haas next year.
Poor Mick Schumacher.
Apparently a fight between him and Danny Riccardio for the job of reserve driver for the Silver Arrows.
I would pay a certain amount of money in to trade in the single market as long as the political part is not included. If the EU members want ever closer union that's up to them.
Those are not the current terms of membership.
Cakeism is not on the menu.
We hold none of the cards.
We can play by the rules, or stand with our noses pressed up against the windows while our economy dies.
This is simply wrong. Remember that there are two separate and distinct things: The EU - the political thing The EEA - the trading thing You can be a member of the EEA without being a member of the EU.
Our challenge now is that although we remain entirely aligned to the EEA rules, we keep saying we don't want to be. At the point where politicians accept the status quo it should be relatively easy to remove most of our self-imposed trading barriers. But first we have to accept reality.
Regarding Twitter, its been entertaining, but on balance I come down more on the side of Elon. Too many tech companies burn other people's cash and have no prospect of actually making money. I'm not surprised that Twitter employees are mournful if so many of them are paid so much with great working conditions and packages from a business that burns investor cash doing so.
Elon is a 17 year-old boy with grand visions for the future. So he can be ruthless with his vision of colonising Mars, but still likes to party and finds fart noises funny. Much of the Twitter chaos is a result of him not doing detail. Once he finds someone to run a slimmed down Twitter it will be fine.
Twitter had made a profit recently. People I know who work IT Ops are not expecting twitter to last the month. They're losing too many people necessary to keep it running.
Fundamentally Musk did not understand the business he bought and as a result he's going to destroy it.
Twitter has only made a profit of any note one year in its existence, and when the other big tech companies were making eye watering amounts. The fundamental problem twitter has always had is that it doesn't know its users well enough for properly targeted ads and never built out the sort of ad systems that has made the likes of google and facebook a bjillion dollars.
Regarding Twitter, its been entertaining, but on balance I come down more on the side of Elon. Too many tech companies burn other people's cash and have no prospect of actually making money. I'm not surprised that Twitter employees are mournful if so many of them are paid so much with great working conditions and packages from a business that burns investor cash doing so.
Elon is a 17 year-old boy with grand visions for the future. So he can be ruthless with his vision of colonising Mars, but still likes to party and finds fart noises funny. Much of the Twitter chaos is a result of him not doing detail. Once he finds someone to run a slimmed down Twitter it will be fine.
Twitter had made a profit recently. People I know who work IT Ops are not expecting twitter to last the month. They're losing too many people necessary to keep it running.
Fundamentally Musk did not understand the business he bought and as a result he's going to destroy it.
I think he understood the business too well. Twitter may go down - seems pretty likely over the next week - but it will come back. There is literally nothing to replace it despite all the competitor attempts.
If you search 🫡💙 there are literally hundreds of engineers leaving Twitter in the last hour after Elon’s ridiculous deadline - and you just get the sense that this man absolutely fucked up a workplace and ethos people really loved for some sort of pointless egocentric vendetta
This is kind of the core of the problem with a lot of tech....the employees love working at a business that loses money every year with no clear path to becoming profitable, in no small part to the fact they get paid massive wages with extremely generous comps and incredible work environments in very expensive locations.
And even the ones that are profitable, it is often only a small core element that makes all the money. Then huge sums are hosed at stuff that never makes any money and gets binned e.g. Google are forever binning things or ending up with multiple teams working on essentially the same thing, all subsidised by their core ad selling offering.
Well, that’s an interesting view, but it’s not very well grounded in reality when it comes to Twitter. Twitter had two profitable years before the pandemic. It’s been hit by a decline in advertising spend, but it has been profitable and it has a “clear path to becoming profitable”… or it did until Musk took over.
Right now, Twitter’s core problem is that Musk is dumb.
Google (properly Alphabet) and other tech companies do end up down many blind alleys, but isn't that necessary for diversification? Google Glass fell on its arse, but Pixel certainly hasn't, nor has Chrome OS. And even if Glass failed, who knows what proprietary tech developed in its genesis won't in future become extremely valuable?
For those wondering, due to a fantastic lack of backing stuff up (I'm a bit more up to date with actual work stuff, fortunately) I've lost pretty much all my betting records for the year.
However, from memory, I was still ahead by a fair margin overall on the five football leagues' betting (£300 or so with £10 per bet) and the last set, after two dreadful rounds, was moderately green.
May or may not bother writing up F1 blogs for the last race.
Speaking of which, the Dracula of F1 has returned. Again. Hulkenberg's going to Haas next year.
Poor Mick Schumacher.
Apparently a fight between him and Danny Riccardio for the job of reserve driver for the Silver Arrows.
Is that even a choice? Even with his recent dip in form, he's a far superior, and much more experienced, driver than Schumacher.
(and even Google is just habitual, Bing or others would probably do as well).
I am constantly surprised at Bing.
I expect it to be awful, and yet every time I use it, it's worse than I could possibly have imagined.
Still weirdly has about 10-15% of the search market.
It's the default for people who buy systems with Windows, and the differences from Google etc. are not immediately perceptible. My subjective impression is that it's a bit less good at finding stuff, but I quite like that they donate a tiny sum to a charity I support for every search I make, so I don't bother to change. I'm sure there are much more serious assessments out there but I'm a casual user of search engines, as are most people.
Also, I use some translation software that is optimised for Bing and works badly with Firefox and Chrome. Maybe there's more like that out there?
Lots of things come with Windows and get ignored. Bing. Xbox gaming bar. Edge. Proprietary apps like Mail. I assume someone uses these. Actually, I do have one use for Edge - it is better at letting me sign PDFs than Chrome.
For those wondering, due to a fantastic lack of backing stuff up (I'm a bit more up to date with actual work stuff, fortunately) I've lost pretty much all my betting records for the year.
However, from memory, I was still ahead by a fair margin overall on the five football leagues' betting (£300 or so with £10 per bet) and the last set, after two dreadful rounds, was moderately green.
May or may not bother writing up F1 blogs for the last race.
Speaking of which, the Dracula of F1 has returned. Again. Hulkenberg's going to Haas next year.
Poor Mick Schumacher.
Apparently a fight between him and Danny Riccardio for the job of reserve driver for the Silver Arrows.
That isn't a fight. Unless Mercedes need someone to stress test parts by crashing a lot.
I would pay a certain amount of money in to trade in the single market as long as the political part is not included. If the EU members want ever closer union that's up to them.
Those are not the current terms of membership.
Cakeism is not on the menu.
We hold none of the cards.
We can play by the rules, or stand with our noses pressed up against the windows while our economy dies.
And then there's the next step.
We don't have to be involved in the political stuff. We could agree, explicitly or implicitly, to just shadow the EU's rules on stuff. Make that clear enough (and I'm sure a form of words could be found) and the border friction goes away.
But I really don't think the UK would enjoy that much. Though I suspect we will try it for a bit.
If you don't want politics (and a lot of politics is ghastly), how do you get any democratic input?
Regarding Twitter, its been entertaining, but on balance I come down more on the side of Elon. Too many tech companies burn other people's cash and have no prospect of actually making money. I'm not surprised that Twitter employees are mournful if so many of them are paid so much with great working conditions and packages from a business that burns investor cash doing so.
Elon is a 17 year-old boy with grand visions for the future. So he can be ruthless with his vision of colonising Mars, but still likes to party and finds fart noises funny. Much of the Twitter chaos is a result of him not doing detail. Once he finds someone to run a slimmed down Twitter it will be fine.
Twitter had made a profit recently. People I know who work IT Ops are not expecting twitter to last the month. They're losing too many people necessary to keep it running.
Fundamentally Musk did not understand the business he bought and as a result he's going to destroy it.
I think he understood the business too well. Twitter may go down - seems pretty likely over the next week - but it will come back. There is literally nothing to replace it despite all the competitor attempts.
I can't quite work out if the above means you think he's done a good or bad thing....
So the $44 billion question: do you think Musk will make money on his deal, or lose a vast amount?
I don't disagree. It should be the policy of any UK government to remove barriers to trade. That does not need political union to do so.
Unless the barrier is "You need to be a member", which is not an uncommon or unrealistic position
I would pay a certain amount of money in to trade in the single market as long as the political part is not included. If the EU members want ever closer union that's up to them.
Isn't the political part where the rules of the single market are defined though? If we became a member of the single market without joining the EU, we would be required to trade by whatever rules the EU specifies but without any input to the decision-making process. That's not exactly taking back control.
I always wonder if twitter had taken the whatsapp route from the start i.e. the 99c a year app with a small hardcore team, just how much money they would have made.....at the time people spent 99c on songs from iTunes etc willy nilly.
Problem is when you start as free, then trying to charge down the road is extremely difficult.
The English refusing to accept that Brexit is responsible for the economic crisis is like Americans refusing to accept guns are responsible for gun crime.
Regarding Twitter, its been entertaining, but on balance I come down more on the side of Elon. Too many tech companies burn other people's cash and have no prospect of actually making money. I'm not surprised that Twitter employees are mournful if so many of them are paid so much with great working conditions and packages from a business that burns investor cash doing so.
Elon is a 17 year-old boy with grand visions for the future. So he can be ruthless with his vision of colonising Mars, but still likes to party and finds fart noises funny. Much of the Twitter chaos is a result of him not doing detail. Once he finds someone to run a slimmed down Twitter it will be fine.
Twitter had made a profit recently. People I know who work IT Ops are not expecting twitter to last the month. They're losing too many people necessary to keep it running.
Fundamentally Musk did not understand the business he bought and as a result he's going to destroy it.
I think he understood the business too well. Twitter may go down - seems pretty likely over the next week - but it will come back. There is literally nothing to replace it despite all the competitor attempts.
The audience that twitter currently serves will fracture. Some will use instagram, others telegram, a few mastodon, others substack, tiktok, etc.
There does not need to be a single Nu-Twitter to see twitter die.
Time for a courageous politician who will be listened to to announce that Brexit is costing the UK £40 billion each year and will continue to do so.
This is £32 billion more than we were paying into the EU for services as advertised on the Red Bus. It is causing the country genuine hardship from which we are unlikely to recover.
Ideally the person announcing their Damascene conversion will be a respected Brexiteer. The likes of Lord Wolfson of Next won't cut it. It needs to be someone who would command all the front pages and would lead the news for days.
It needs to be someone who would open the floodgates,
Boris would be ideal. Even Cummings would be a possibility. Gove is considered a heavyweight intellectual by Tories so he might do. But it has to be done quickly and the narrative could change overnight. A new mood of optimism could sweep the country
Good luck with that one. The problem of course is that Brexit as such is an absolute and binary choice. You are either in or not in the EU. The absoluteness of this is clear from the failure pre-2016 to negotiate even a simulacrum of a derogation from FOM, the one issue which would have turned around the result.
And, as the result 52/48 showed there is no clear consensus behind either of those two choices, nor is there going to be.
EEA/EFTA or another version of remaining in the SM always was the only solution in 2016 and it still is.
It remains the case of course that it is complete social folly to insist that frictionless free trade in goods and services must entail frictionless free trade in people. The UK are complicit of course in agreeing to this folly in the first place.
After yesterdays budget, I think it’s more likely than not we will end up back in the SM. Will start with the custom union first, considering people are now realising the trade deals promised are all a load of tosh
The English refusing to accept that Brexit is responsible for the economic crisis is like Americans refusing to accept guns are responsible for gun crime.
That’s a pretty big brush you’re tarring us with. Lovely
Regarding Twitter, its been entertaining, but on balance I come down more on the side of Elon. Too many tech companies burn other people's cash and have no prospect of actually making money. I'm not surprised that Twitter employees are mournful if so many of them are paid so much with great working conditions and packages from a business that burns investor cash doing so.
Elon is a 17 year-old boy with grand visions for the future. So he can be ruthless with his vision of colonising Mars, but still likes to party and finds fart noises funny. Much of the Twitter chaos is a result of him not doing detail. Once he finds someone to run a slimmed down Twitter it will be fine.
Twitter had made a profit recently. People I know who work IT Ops are not expecting twitter to last the month. They're losing too many people necessary to keep it running.
Fundamentally Musk did not understand the business he bought and as a result he's going to destroy it.
He's allegedly also brought in software engineers he trusts from Tesla and SpaceX to sort Twitter out. Which might seem like a good idea, except Twitter is a slightly different business (especially SpaceX), and they're likely to be Elon yes-boys who will p*ss off the current employees.
The English refusing to accept that Brexit is responsible for the economic crisis is like Americans refusing to accept guns are responsible for gun crime.
Brexit is not primarily responsible for the economic crisis; Covid and Ukraine are. But Brexit has almost certainly exacerbated it, especially for us but also for the EU.
Musk is aiming to completely reset what he sees as a failing corporate culture in a very short space of time, against a backdrop of a biting global recession and drying up liquidity. It’s a fascinating spectacle. Business Studies lecturers will be loving it in a few years, either as a case study in what is possible (or what is not!).
Incidentally, how many times did Scott link to Twitter posts by 9am today? Feels to me like the drama Musk has injected is sure grabbing hold of eyeballs. Just needs to keep them and monetise them now.
For those wondering, due to a fantastic lack of backing stuff up (I'm a bit more up to date with actual work stuff, fortunately) I've lost pretty much all my betting records for the year.
However, from memory, I was still ahead by a fair margin overall on the five football leagues' betting (£300 or so with £10 per bet) and the last set, after two dreadful rounds, was moderately green.
May or may not bother writing up F1 blogs for the last race.
Speaking of which, the Dracula of F1 has returned. Again. Hulkenberg's going to Haas next year.
Poor Mick Schumacher.
Apparently a fight between him and Danny Riccardio for the job of reserve driver for the Silver Arrows.
Schumacher just crashed that Haas too regularly. Hate to think of what it cost them
Regarding Twitter, its been entertaining, but on balance I come down more on the side of Elon. Too many tech companies burn other people's cash and have no prospect of actually making money. I'm not surprised that Twitter employees are mournful if so many of them are paid so much with great working conditions and packages from a business that burns investor cash doing so.
Elon is a 17 year-old boy with grand visions for the future. So he can be ruthless with his vision of colonising Mars, but still likes to party and finds fart noises funny. Much of the Twitter chaos is a result of him not doing detail. Once he finds someone to run a slimmed down Twitter it will be fine.
Twitter had made a profit recently. People I know who work IT Ops are not expecting twitter to last the month. They're losing too many people necessary to keep it running.
Fundamentally Musk did not understand the business he bought and as a result he's going to destroy it.
Twitter has only made a profit of any note one year in its existence, and when the other big tech companies were making eye watering amounts. The fundamental problem twitter has always had is that it doesn't know its users well enough for properly targeted ads and never built out the sort of ad systems that has made the likes of google and facebook a bjillion dollars.
Yes, twitter was a greatly flawed business before Musk bought it, though had potential. But I don't buy the defence of Musk that is going around that twitter was a basket case, and if it fails on his watch that was more twitter's fault than his. If that was the case then why did he pay £44bn for it?
Regarding Twitter, its been entertaining, but on balance I come down more on the side of Elon. Too many tech companies burn other people's cash and have no prospect of actually making money. I'm not surprised that Twitter employees are mournful if so many of them are paid so much with great working conditions and packages from a business that burns investor cash doing so.
Elon is a 17 year-old boy with grand visions for the future. So he can be ruthless with his vision of colonising Mars, but still likes to party and finds fart noises funny. Much of the Twitter chaos is a result of him not doing detail. Once he finds someone to run a slimmed down Twitter it will be fine.
Twitter had made a profit recently. People I know who work IT Ops are not expecting twitter to last the month. They're losing too many people necessary to keep it running.
Fundamentally Musk did not understand the business he bought and as a result he's going to destroy it.
I think he understood the business too well. Twitter may go down - seems pretty likely over the next week - but it will come back. There is literally nothing to replace it despite all the competitor attempts.
I can't quite work out if the above means you think he's done a good or bad thing....
So the $44 billion question: do you think Musk will make money on his deal, or lose a vast amount?
It may well be a trojan(ish) horse for his long-planned 'X' service, kinda like weibo, a do-everything app. If so it's a huge gamble, but not a hopeless one.
Generating huge amounts of antipathy towards himself as a very public figurehead of the company probably isn't a great start though.
And re no viable competitor - this is true, but it doesn't mean it can't collapse. EDIT: also for many people (like me!) leaving Twitter was actually quite easy, as what I used it for turns ou to be easily replaced by Reddit.
The English refusing to accept that Brexit is responsible for the economic crisis is like Americans refusing to accept guns are responsible for gun crime.
Its pretty clear to most sensible people that there is a global economic crisis (Covid, war, China going mad trying to eliminate covid) AND Brexit is making things worse in the UK. Brexit is NOT responsible for the economic crisis. Inflation is very similar across Europe. Higher in some places, lower in others.
Regarding Twitter, its been entertaining, but on balance I come down more on the side of Elon. Too many tech companies burn other people's cash and have no prospect of actually making money. I'm not surprised that Twitter employees are mournful if so many of them are paid so much with great working conditions and packages from a business that burns investor cash doing so.
Elon is a 17 year-old boy with grand visions for the future. So he can be ruthless with his vision of colonising Mars, but still likes to party and finds fart noises funny. Much of the Twitter chaos is a result of him not doing detail. Once he finds someone to run a slimmed down Twitter it will be fine.
Twitter had made a profit recently. People I know who work IT Ops are not expecting twitter to last the month. They're losing too many people necessary to keep it running.
Fundamentally Musk did not understand the business he bought and as a result he's going to destroy it.
Twitter has only made a profit of any note one year in its existence, and when the other big tech companies were making eye watering amounts. The fundamental problem twitter has always had is that it doesn't know its users well enough for properly targeted ads and never built out the sort of ad systems that has made the likes of google and facebook a bjillion dollars.
Yes, twitter was a greatly flawed business before Musk bought it, though had potential. But I don't buy the defence of Musk that is going around that twitter was a basket case, and if it fails on his watch that was more twitter's fault than his. If that was the case then why did he pay £44bn for it?
The same reason why Liverpool paid £35m for Andy Carol just after selling Torres for £50m the same day. He had the funds and that was the price to get the deal done.
Musk is aiming to completely reset what he sees as a failing corporate culture in a very short space of time, against a backdrop of a biting global recession and drying up liquidity. It’s a fascinating spectacle. Business Studies lecturers will be loving it in a few years, either as a case study in what is possible (or what is not!).
Incidentally, how many times did Scott link to Twitter posts by 9am today? Feels to me like the drama Musk has injected is sure grabbing hold of eyeballs. Just needs to keep them and monetise them now.
I keep hearing twitter is broken, but I don't know what that means. Its not stopped endless retweets from Scott'n'Paste, and I seem to be reading the people I always followed. In what way is it broken?
Regarding Twitter, its been entertaining, but on balance I come down more on the side of Elon. Too many tech companies burn other people's cash and have no prospect of actually making money. I'm not surprised that Twitter employees are mournful if so many of them are paid so much with great working conditions and packages from a business that burns investor cash doing so.
Elon is a 17 year-old boy with grand visions for the future. So he can be ruthless with his vision of colonising Mars, but still likes to party and finds fart noises funny. Much of the Twitter chaos is a result of him not doing detail. Once he finds someone to run a slimmed down Twitter it will be fine.
Twitter had made a profit recently. People I know who work IT Ops are not expecting twitter to last the month. They're losing too many people necessary to keep it running.
Fundamentally Musk did not understand the business he bought and as a result he's going to destroy it.
Twitter has only made a profit of any note one year in its existence, and when the other big tech companies were making eye watering amounts. The fundamental problem twitter has always had is that it doesn't know its users well enough for properly targeted ads and never built out the sort of ad systems that has made the likes of google and facebook a bjillion dollars.
Yes, twitter was a greatly flawed business before Musk bought it, though had potential. But I don't buy the defence of Musk that is going around that twitter was a basket case, and if it fails on his watch that was more twitter's fault than his. If that was the case then why did he pay £44bn for it?
As i said down thread, he has done a Big Dom. Identified a problem with staff culture, bots, need to diversify away from simply ad revenue & produce new features....then his radical "solution" has managed to piss everybody off and danger of burning everything down.
(and even Google is just habitual, Bing or others would probably do as well).
I am constantly surprised at Bing.
I expect it to be awful, and yet every time I use it, it's worse than I could possibly have imagined.
Still weirdly has about 10-15% of the search market.
It's the default for people who buy systems with Windows, and the differences from Google etc. are not immediately perceptible. My subjective impression is that it's a bit less good at finding stuff, but I quite like that they donate a tiny sum to a charity I support for every search I make, so I don't bother to change. I'm sure there are much more serious assessments out there but I'm a casual user of search engines, as are most people.
Also, I use some translation software that is optimised for Bing and works badly with Firefox and Chrome. Maybe there's more like that out there?
Lots of things come with Windows and get ignored. Bing. Xbox gaming bar. Edge. Proprietary apps like Mail. I assume someone uses these. Actually, I do have one use for Edge - it is better at letting me sign PDFs than Chrome.
My biggest gripe with bing is that if you search for Bing maps (or even type in the address for Bing maps) in android, it redirects you to bing.
Bing maps is great, by the way, because it has an Ordnance Survey layer.
Regarding Twitter, its been entertaining, but on balance I come down more on the side of Elon. Too many tech companies burn other people's cash and have no prospect of actually making money. I'm not surprised that Twitter employees are mournful if so many of them are paid so much with great working conditions and packages from a business that burns investor cash doing so.
Elon is a 17 year-old boy with grand visions for the future. So he can be ruthless with his vision of colonising Mars, but still likes to party and finds fart noises funny. Much of the Twitter chaos is a result of him not doing detail. Once he finds someone to run a slimmed down Twitter it will be fine.
Twitter had made a profit recently. People I know who work IT Ops are not expecting twitter to last the month. They're losing too many people necessary to keep it running.
Fundamentally Musk did not understand the business he bought and as a result he's going to destroy it.
Twitter has only made a profit of any note one year in its existence, and when the other big tech companies were making eye watering amounts. The fundamental problem twitter has always had is that it doesn't know its users well enough for properly targeted ads and never built out the sort of ad systems that has made the likes of google and facebook a bjillion dollars.
Yes, twitter was a greatly flawed business before Musk bought it, though had potential. But I don't buy the defence of Musk that is going around that twitter was a basket case, and if it fails on his watch that was more twitter's fault than his. If that was the case then why did he pay £44bn for it?
That's what I don't understand. Why did he buy it if he thought it was such rubbish?
Why not just start his own rival platform called Twatter or whatever?
The English refusing to accept that Brexit is responsible for the economic crisis is like Americans refusing to accept guns are responsible for gun crime.
So, it seems the open door liberal economists have won over Sunak. Net immigration >200k/yr for the forseeable future. Mostly low skilled. Once you account for the departure of our young smart emigres, the actual immigration figure will be a fair bit higher.
As we enter the recession - with unemployment predicted to soar - and brits at the bottom of the employment pile have their wages further suppressed, what’s the plan?
Musk is aiming to completely reset what he sees as a failing corporate culture in a very short space of time, against a backdrop of a biting global recession and drying up liquidity. It’s a fascinating spectacle. Business Studies lecturers will be loving it in a few years, either as a case study in what is possible (or what is not!).
Incidentally, how many times did Scott link to Twitter posts by 9am today? Feels to me like the drama Musk has injected is sure grabbing hold of eyeballs. Just needs to keep them and monetise them now.
I keep hearing twitter is broken, but I don't know what that means. Its not stopped endless retweets from Scott'n'Paste, and I seem to be reading the people I always followed. In what way is it broken?
Twitter's position at the moment seems to be analogous to the cartoon character who has run off the edge of a cliff, but hasn't started falling yet because they haven't looked down.
Musk is aiming to completely reset what he sees as a failing corporate culture in a very short space of time, against a backdrop of a biting global recession and drying up liquidity. It’s a fascinating spectacle. Business Studies lecturers will be loving it in a few years, either as a case study in what is possible (or what is not!).
Incidentally, how many times did Scott link to Twitter posts by 9am today? Feels to me like the drama Musk has injected is sure grabbing hold of eyeballs. Just needs to keep them and monetise them now.
I keep hearing twitter is broken, but I don't know what that means. Its not stopped endless retweets from Scott'n'Paste, and I seem to be reading the people I always followed. In what way is it broken?
The reason Elon likes Twitter so much is that it attracts fellow drama queens that feverishly post to create a febrile atmosphere.
Musk is aiming to completely reset what he sees as a failing corporate culture in a very short space of time, against a backdrop of a biting global recession and drying up liquidity. It’s a fascinating spectacle. Business Studies lecturers will be loving it in a few years, either as a case study in what is possible (or what is not!).
Incidentally, how many times did Scott link to Twitter posts by 9am today? Feels to me like the drama Musk has injected is sure grabbing hold of eyeballs. Just needs to keep them and monetise them now.
I keep hearing twitter is broken, but I don't know what that means. Its not stopped endless retweets from Scott'n'Paste, and I seem to be reading the people I always followed. In what way is it broken?
Twitter's position at the moment seems to be analogous to the cartoon character who has run off the edge of a cliff, but hasn't started falling yet because they haven't looked down.
And what is equivalent to gravity in that situation? (Genuine question, because I don't really understand the issues).
The English refusing to accept that Brexit is responsible for the economic crisis is like Americans refusing to accept guns are responsible for gun crime.
Regarding Twitter, its been entertaining, but on balance I come down more on the side of Elon. Too many tech companies burn other people's cash and have no prospect of actually making money. I'm not surprised that Twitter employees are mournful if so many of them are paid so much with great working conditions and packages from a business that burns investor cash doing so.
Elon is a 17 year-old boy with grand visions for the future. So he can be ruthless with his vision of colonising Mars, but still likes to party and finds fart noises funny. Much of the Twitter chaos is a result of him not doing detail. Once he finds someone to run a slimmed down Twitter it will be fine.
Twitter had made a profit recently. People I know who work IT Ops are not expecting twitter to last the month. They're losing too many people necessary to keep it running.
Fundamentally Musk did not understand the business he bought and as a result he's going to destroy it.
Twitter has only made a profit of any note one year in its existence, and when the other big tech companies were making eye watering amounts. The fundamental problem twitter has always had is that it doesn't know its users well enough for properly targeted ads and never built out the sort of ad systems that has made the likes of google and facebook a bjillion dollars.
Yes, twitter was a greatly flawed business before Musk bought it, though had potential. But I don't buy the defence of Musk that is going around that twitter was a basket case, and if it fails on his watch that was more twitter's fault than his. If that was the case then why did he pay £44bn for it?
That's what I don't understand. Why did he buy it if he thought it was such rubbish?
Why not just start his own rival platform called Twatter or whatever?
He has talked about this, he thought buying Twitter probably accelerated his plans by around 5 years so thought it was worth rolling the dice on it.
Musk is aiming to completely reset what he sees as a failing corporate culture in a very short space of time, against a backdrop of a biting global recession and drying up liquidity. It’s a fascinating spectacle. Business Studies lecturers will be loving it in a few years, either as a case study in what is possible (or what is not!).
Incidentally, how many times did Scott link to Twitter posts by 9am today? Feels to me like the drama Musk has injected is sure grabbing hold of eyeballs. Just needs to keep them and monetise them now.
I keep hearing twitter is broken, but I don't know what that means. Its not stopped endless retweets from Scott'n'Paste, and I seem to be reading the people I always followed. In what way is it broken?
It’s now run by someone who describes himself as a conservative. That makes it broken in the eyes of many, including many who work there.
Musk is aiming to completely reset what he sees as a failing corporate culture in a very short space of time, against a backdrop of a biting global recession and drying up liquidity. It’s a fascinating spectacle. Business Studies lecturers will be loving it in a few years, either as a case study in what is possible (or what is not!).
Incidentally, how many times did Scott link to Twitter posts by 9am today? Feels to me like the drama Musk has injected is sure grabbing hold of eyeballs. Just needs to keep them and monetise them now.
I keep hearing twitter is broken, but I don't know what that means. Its not stopped endless retweets from Scott'n'Paste, and I seem to be reading the people I always followed. In what way is it broken?
It’s now run by someone who describes himself as a conservative. That makes it broken in the eyes of many, including many who work there.
The Twitter episode of the eventual Musk Netflix biopic is gonna be pretty wild.
Quite amusing browsing #twitterrip. So much hyperbole. Even our own JJ has fallen down with a severe bout of MDS.
Why is it MDS? Are you saying this is all some form of genius masterplan that we're not God-level enough to understand?
In which case, can you explain it to us? For us plebs, it just looks like an hilarious clusterf*ck of epic proportions.
Even if the servers hold up, I'd like to see an explanation of how this works financially. The extra billion a year in financing costs, for a company that was only intermittently profitable, means that even drastic cost cutting isn't going to sort things out.
And he's just sabotaged a significant amount of his ad revenue.
Having already announced that he's actively looking for a CEO to hand over the running to, how is the Musk genius going to stretch between his existing ventures and the new toy ?
Its running costs have only been about $3bn a year. If he’s succeeded in halving that for the same product offering, even with the debt interest on top that’s a pretty good cost base to grow from...
He hasn't. And again the same time he's also cut revenue significantly, as evidenced by his own tweets. The magical thinking doesn't stack up.
Comments
I expect it to be awful, and yet every time I use it, it's worse than I could possibly have imagined.
Elon is a 17 year-old boy with grand visions for the future. So he can be ruthless with his vision of colonising Mars, but still likes to party and finds fart noises funny. Much of the Twitter chaos is a result of him not doing detail. Once he finds someone to run a slimmed down Twitter it will be fine.
And, as the result 52/48 showed there is no clear consensus behind either of those two choices, nor is there going to be.
EEA/EFTA or another version of remaining in the SM always was the only solution in 2016 and it still is.
It remains the case of course that it is complete social folly to insist that frictionless free trade in goods and services must entail frictionless free trade in people. The UK are complicit of course in agreeing to this folly in the first place.
Conservative MP Victoria Atkins tells #bbcqt audience to ‘move on’ because Brexit “happened six years ago”.
This gentleman rightly calls out the absurdity of her position. The sooner we start talking about the damage of Brexit, the quicker we can work our way out of this mess. https://twitter.com/EddieBurfi/status/1593341138789859329/video/1
#bbcqt audience 1 - When are we going to start talking about rejoining the single market?
Victoria Atkins(Tory MP) embarrasses herself.🤦
#bbcqt audience 2 - I'm not interested in Trading with Australia or NZ.... brexit is a disaster.. https://twitter.com/Haggis_UK/status/1593339794393907208/video/1
The only politician prepared to say what others fear...
The Tories won’t say it.
Labour daren’t say it.
The whole planet sees it.
BREXIT IS A SHITSHOW.
https://twitter.com/CountBinface/status/1592216085633564673
The less friction, the better.
This is fact, not fiction.
Even the Brexiteers are saying this.
https://twitter.com/alexeheath/status/1593431420587761664
- Analyses show traces of explosives on several of the incongruous objects that were found, he says
Jeremy Hunt says there needs to be a “longer term plan” to cut migration
BUT the UK will “need migration in the years ahead” to boost the stuttering economy
https://twitter.com/kateferguson4/status/1593519741662027777
Twitter could have taken the freemium path (basic product free, as now, and charge for extras) which seems to have been Musk's plan but the f'wit decided to charge for the blue tick, whose veracity underpins Twitter. What's the point of being on Twitter to follow (say) Elon Musk if you now can't be sure it really is Elon Musk?
That alone speaks volumes
https://twitter.com/Sillyshib/status/1593328549309579264
https://twitter.com/IanDunt/status/1593520451111845888
No. Shit. Sherlock.
Asked by Mishal if rejoining SM wd boost growth
Chancellor “having unfettered trade with our neighbours is very beneficial to growth..have great confidence that over years ahead, outside the single market, able to remove the vast majority of trade barriers between us & EU”
Suggests at margin different approach to at least try to lower some of the non tariff barriers that have arisen as a result of Boris Johnson/ Frost’s Brexit deal… businesses will be queuing up to tell them about some of the issues for traders…
https://twitter.com/faisalislam/status/1593521496428843009
There is Labour's GE campaign, right there.
"remove the vast majority of trade barriers between us & EU"
English Government 🤫
https://twitter.com/scottishlass481/status/1593233082186108930?s=46&t=kgVSTnNjcVHmlTgv23SBiQ
Mentioning the elephant in the room.
Twitter is essentially similar, but with a much smaller user base and a worse ad service.
The oddity, though, is that Boris might have had a better chance of winning the next GE, because he reached people who don't care about the details of politics and enjoy the knockabout. I don't think there are enough voters who appreciate serious government AND are willing to vote Tory.
Mr. Eagles, I approve of your DS9 reference.
Cakeism is not on the menu.
We hold none of the cards.
We can play by the rules, or stand with our noses pressed up against the windows while our economy dies.
Elim Garak is my spirit animal.
I think the Tories are finished for now and deserve to be given a thorough kicking for the Brexit disaster, Osborne's austerity and the madness of Truss. But I think that Sunak-Hunt is a refreshingly serious team and I find it hard to muster any serious loathing for them. In fact I feel a bit sorry for them and wish them luck.
Fundamentally Musk did not understand the business he bought and as a result he's going to destroy it.
However, from memory, I was still ahead by a fair margin overall on the five football leagues' betting (£300 or so with £10 per bet) and the last set, after two dreadful rounds, was moderately green.
May or may not bother writing up F1 blogs for the last race.
Speaking of which, the Dracula of F1 has returned. Again. Hulkenberg's going to Haas next year.
Also, I use some translation software that is optimised for Bing and works badly with Firefox and Chrome. Maybe there's more like that out there?
Apparently a fight between him and Danny Riccardio for the job of reserve driver for the Silver Arrows.
The EU - the political thing
The EEA - the trading thing
You can be a member of the EEA without being a member of the EU.
Our challenge now is that although we remain entirely aligned to the EEA rules, we keep saying we don't want to be. At the point where politicians accept the status quo it should be relatively easy to remove most of our self-imposed trading barriers. But first we have to accept reality.
We don't have to be involved in the political stuff. We could agree, explicitly or implicitly, to just shadow the EU's rules on stuff. Make that clear enough (and I'm sure a form of words could be found) and the border friction goes away.
But I really don't think the UK would enjoy that much. Though I suspect we will try it for a bit.
If you don't want politics (and a lot of politics is ghastly), how do you get any democratic input?
So the $44 billion question: do you think Musk will make money on his deal, or lose a vast amount?
Problem is when you start as free, then trying to charge down the road is extremely difficult.
https://twitter.com/DMcWilliams_UK/status/1593518550630731777
There does not need to be a single Nu-Twitter to see twitter die.
That’s a pretty big brush you’re tarring us with. Lovely
Incidentally, how many times did Scott link to Twitter posts by 9am today? Feels to me like the drama Musk has injected is sure grabbing hold of eyeballs. Just needs to keep them and monetise them now.
His actor shares Garak's claustrophobia, which must have made some of the scenes a bit tricky.
Generating huge amounts of antipathy towards himself as a very public figurehead of the company probably isn't a great start though.
And re no viable competitor - this is true, but it doesn't mean it can't collapse. EDIT: also for many people (like me!) leaving Twitter was actually quite easy, as what I used it for turns ou to be easily replaced by Reddit.
Bing maps is great, by the way, because it has an Ordnance Survey layer.
Why not just start his own rival platform called Twatter or whatever?
As we enter the recession - with unemployment predicted to soar - and brits at the bottom of the employment pile have their wages further suppressed, what’s the plan?
Dismiss them as racist, I guess.
Plus ca change.
And again the same time he's also cut revenue significantly, as evidenced by his own tweets.
The magical thinking doesn't stack up.