Why does Apple need Twitter?

Virtually all Apple critics agreed that the company should buy Twitter, but Apple’s former engineer, Patrick Gibson, believes that the real value of this purchase will be that Twitter can help Apple in developing really useful and working internet services.


The former Apple engineer was the last to agree that the giant consumer electronics company, for which he had worked for a long time, really had to devour Twitter. However, Patrick Gibson, the man who worked on the first-generation iPad, did not mean that Apple should buy Twitter, only to make its applications and services more social-oriented. Gibson thinks Apple needs to absorb Twitter, because at the moment the apple giant lacks an understanding of how to actually create web applications that would really work. So can Twitter fill in the missing links in Apple's DNA chain for success in the Internet application market?

It is easy to argue against Apple, because even the most ardent fans of the company recognize some of its shortcomings, if you ask them alone or after a couple of drunk glasses :). As Gibson notes, Apple has a dreadful product in terms of usability in its arsenal, known to all of us as iTunes. Even long-time users of iTunes have noted his habit, such as, for example, the sudden removal of music or other content without any warnings. In addition, Apple also has some social projects, such as Ping and Game Center, which currently claim the title of virtual ghost towns (Ping has been eliminated not so long ago). Well and, of course, it is impossible not to mention their ancestor - "dinosaur", previously known as .Mac and MobileMe, now renamed iCloud.
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Gibson also emphasizes that the company's ability to offer high-quality cloud services to the consumer (which, in fact, are ordinary web services with a new fictitious name) becomes crucial for organizations such as Apple and Google in an attempt to make relationships with end users more durable. And while Google is still behind Apple in the design and convenience of the devices themselves, it is significantly ahead of the apple company in everything related to web services. Only compare mail on iCloud and in Gmail or iTunes and Google Play, and Apple will seem to you an obvious outsider. Gibson adds, quoting his friend:

“It seems that Google is improving its skills in creating devices faster than Apple does with its web services. For many years now I have been a Mac proponent and an ardent fan of Apple, but even I admit that Apple’s approach to creating web products is a complete failure. Almost everything Apple does and that it’s somehow connected to the Internet makes me deeply disappointed. ”

Apple does not fully understand what social networks are.

The inscription on the picture:

• 3-fold increase in the number of iOS users among people registered on Twitter
• 10 billion tweets made via iOS 5
• 47% of all photos posted on Twitter were uploaded using iOS 5

In an attempt to improve the social component of its products, realizing how terrible Ping was, Apple announced a collaboration with Twitter, which developed a social service embedded right in the software of all Apple products (and just recently announced something similar with Facebook). In principle, such cooperation can already be called a partnership, and the takeover may seem inappropriate for Apple, as financial columnist Barry Ritholtz and some others previously thought.

However, the main idea of ​​Patrick Gibson is not that the purchase of Twitter should make Apple more social-oriented. According to him, the main reason why this should be done is that Twitter understands how to develop, maintain and develop such large-scale web services that process hundreds of thousands of interactions every minute. From the point of view of Gibson, Apple is hardly capable of doing this on its own. Here is how he describes this situation:

“Twitter is not just using the most advanced web technology, he invented it ... Apple should buy Twitter not because of its social network, but because of accumulated experience, knowledge and technology, which undoubtedly can help bring Apple and iCloud to 21 century. A social network in this case acts rather as an additional bonus. ”

Having put forward his theory, Gibson goes on to list the reasons why the transaction is not likely to take place, among which is the fact that Twitter will prefer to remain independent and will try to justify its market value of 10 billion dollars. Apple, in turn, denying all the failures of its outdated approach to web technologies, may find it inappropriate to throw out such a large amount of money for this purchase. In addition, “increasingly transforming into a media company, Twitter is likely to lose some of its developer staff, and with it, some of its potential, which will undoubtedly make Twitter a less attractive purchase,” said Gibson (by the way, - what of what Gibson is talking about already happens in reality).

However, this is an interesting idea. There is no doubt that the weakest side of Apple are web services, and so far there is no reason to believe that the company has seriously taken up the solution to this problem. Although some Apple fans still hope that design gurus Jony Ive will be able to help by taking responsibility for the usability of all Apple products, and not just the hardware of the devices. Merging corporate cultures is never easy, but Twitter would probably be the easiest to fit into Apple’s structure, if, of course, the company still wants to reach unprecedented heights and apply for the purchase of Google itself.

PS On gigaom this article caused a whole storm of discussions, such as: how iTunes can be worse than Google Play, iCloud a good cloud, etc.
Interesting opinion Habra, what do you think?