Twitter is a very successful product, but by most accounts a highly dysfunctional company. They have one hit product, the core microblogging service. It has evolved admirably. But new products and features introduced by Twitter have had chequered success, to be charitable. Promising acquisitions in growth areas (Periscope, Vine) have withered and died under their stewardship.
The value of their core product is not primarily technical but social and cultural, as has been pointed out ad infinitum (the “twitter clone” microblogging weekend project in new language/framework is a cliche). Musk does have the ability to quickly burn that cultural capital. But it’s too early to tell to what extent it will happen, and in what ways it will hurt the service.
Even the most outraged user claims are unreliable. Too many users get too much value out of the professional, cultural and social networks they’ve formed using Twitter. I’ve already read one gloomy, regretful account of migrating to mastodon. There’s a high probability that many of these users, who are loud but unquestionably in the minority, will eventually return after self imposed exile.
Whether the product itself will implode or degrade for technical reasons, very few are in a position to accurately predict.
Comparing Twitter to Atari seems unfair to Atari, a company that had success in several markets and that successfully innovated for a sustained period of time.
I think an instructive comparison may be Musk’s acquisition of The Onion staff, which (according to my memory of the incident) he did primarily out of spite. His attempt to launch a rival humor website with those writers flopped disastrously, and was quickly forgotten. It’s support for the argument that Musk will approach a cultural product with an engineering mindset. But it remains to be seen what, if anything, he learned from that experience.
