Apple should buy Twitter, and they should do it now

> Apple should buy Twitter not for its social network, but for its talent and technology.

What? Seriously? Apple should acquihire Twitter?

> The social network is basically an added bonus.

I think we're done here.

I am generally wary of these self-proclaimed "experts" writing about topics they don't have much idea about.

1) This guy is not a part of* Twitter, so he knows nothing about what Twitter's situation is from the inside.

2) This guy is not a part of* Apple, he has no idea about what Apple's budgets and plans and areas of interest are.

If I were an executive from say, the buyer, that is Apple, give me one good reason why I should listen to this guy's advice?

Writing controversial headlines is good for pageviews, but if you don't know what you're talking about, you might as well not create a stir in an otherwise peaceful community.

(*part of = part of the organization)

Interesting that the first "other problem" Apple has is listed as

* Apple can’t update its online store without taking it offline first.

In my experience it's a minority view that Apple are unable to do this. It seems more likely that it's a pure marketing decision, built around Apple's very successful hype machine approach.

For all of Apple's failings it's a stretch to suggest that they aren't technically competent enough to build an online store.

> Android is still ugly, but it’s much less ugly than it was a few years ago.

It this opinion common? Trying friends' iOS devices, I can't say I've ever thought "gee, this is so much prettier than my Android phone".

I agree with the fundamental observation: Google is getting better at a lot of the stuff Apple does faster than Apple is getting better at the stuff Google does. This isn't surprising, Apple is a very, very focused company.

Here's where the article lost me: "They (Twitter) own scale". Seriously, Twitter has gotten shaky under load despite not doing push or even live updating its web page (compare this to Facebook's timeline).

For that matter, iTunes represents scale on a level unimaginable to Twitter. How much data does the writer think Apple is vending to support all the on-demand video, app purchases, and whatnot? Sure, iTunes goes down now and then, but so do Netflix and Hulu.

But there were a number of incorrect but less annoying observations beforehand. E.g. Apple doesn't NEED to take its online store offline to update stuff. It updates stuff all the time. Consider the rumor factory around Apple, I suspect the main reason is to stop folks spelunking the Apple Store constantly (especially during the lead-up to announcements) -- which they do ANYWAY.

I gave up taking the article seriously after I read the statement about WebObjects. The first release of WebObjects was in 1995. It's gone through some radical changes since it was first introduced. The biggest of them was the conversion of the framework from Objective C-based to Java. Just because a framework is old, it doesn't mean that it's bad. 

Do you think you'd have to wait 6 weeks before apple approved your tweet and let it go live?

The best product company should acquire one of the weakest ones?

In my opinion it's Square, not Twitter that makes sense for Apple the most.

Payments has the potential to be a multi billion dollar business for them if executed correctly.

This is largely nonsensical. Apple has trouble with "The Cloud", so it should buy a company that doesn't solve any of its problems, as a signaling device to potential future hires? What? And I take second place to no man in my disdain for WebObjects, but I know for a fact that a) Apple has very good engineers working on tooling and b) it really doesn't matter to the problems as stated, which are much more about executive attention.

The cloud stuff doesn't make money. Apple is (or was, when I was there last) an extremely profit conscious organization. The reason that the various previous internet initiatives were failures is not because Apple can't hire good engineers, or uses yesterday's technology, but rather because no executive was going to make it to VP by spending a bunch of money and more importantly engineer time on something that by design loses money, and has only the vaguest connection to driving adoption of hardware.

This latter has certainly changed -- if the OP has noticed that Android "Just Works" in ways that iOS doesn't, rest assured that Apple knows.

Thinking that Apple should buy an overpriced company (in billions) that doesnt have a sustainable business model to improve their web serices is ludicrous at best. If you are going to spend money in that scale, buy TomTom. At least you would get a super profitable business and solve a real problem Apple has (worldwide maps and amazing geodata collection teams)

I always thought the Apple webstore going offline was more a marketing hype thing, rather than a technical one.

But does Apple need to build that level of scale? The article makes valid points about Apple needing to beef up its web teams - but a $1bn acqhire seems excessive. Better cherry picking some top quality individuals to drive a vision and letting them lose on talented developers than buying an entire infrastructure that isn't really what Apple wants. Plus Apple could never kill off Twitter. It's too "hot" - an with that comes attention. Apple's pockets are deep enough for all and sundry to sue, or governments to get in glossy fits over (allegedly) blasphemous/libellous tweets.

Can someone give a rough range for how much Twitter would cost to buy? Instagram was $1bn, and I'd say Twitter is at least an order of magnitude higher, no?

Im sure for around a Billion dollars they could probably do some pretty crazy stuff in-house since advertising/media isnt really their thing.

Apple would be far better off buying Joyent.

I rather spend $10B in producing ten million TVs and selling them at 50% profit.

Jobs would agree.

Duckduckgo would make more sense in my opinion.