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Apple + Twitter? No

May 5th, 2009

Sometimes an Apple rumor floats by that strikes me as so pathetically ridiculous I just have to get the BB gun out and fire away, Betty Draper style. Today it’s Apple acquiring Twitter.

Pretty much every acquisition Apple has ever made, made sense as something they could incorporate into their software or product lines at the time (think Emagic and Logic which led to Garageband). And they were usually lower-profile companies that didn’t have ridiculous speculative buzz around them like Twitter, and hence raising that company’s price beyond sanity. The biggest one in the past decades was NeXT, where they got the foundation for OS X and Steve Jobs. What they got from that one acquisition alone just shows how powerful Twitter hype has become.

If Apple has anything to do with Twitter, they’d add Twitter support to iChat (duh). At speculative most, they could purchase the software maker of a Twitter client for the iPhone, but there isn’t anything there that Apple couldn’t do itself if it so desired.

There are many reasons why Apple has billions of cash stockpiled, and one is its reluctance to make frivolous, speculative acquisitions.

Apple is no eBay and it’s not about to do a StumbleUpon.

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  • jcieplinski
    Couldn't agree more. Not to mention, every article on this rumor goes out of its way to say that its sources are completely unverified. In other words, someone completely pulled this one out of his butt.

    And it really does make no sense. Every division of Apple is profitable. Even when Apple gives away an app, like iPhoto, that app still generates revenue via photo print and photo book sales. Even Garageband now sells music lessons. There's always some sort of revenue stream from just about everything they do.

    Twitter, no matter how good an idea it is, no matter how many Oprahs and Aston Kushers sign up, has no business model whatsoever. It functions purely on venture capital. That's not the Apple way of doing things.

    Unless someone at Apple has figured out some brilliant way to make money off twitter that no one else has, this is never going to happen. And to be honest, I don't know how anyone could make money off of twitter. You can't attach ads to tweets, and you can't charge people subscription fees, because they'd all just quit using it. It's a dead-end business. Maybe someone like Google or Facebook could incorporate it into a larger overall social media strategy, and run it at a loss in order to enhance the big picture. But Apple has no need for that, and more importantly, no history of ever doing something like that.

    Twitter should have jumped on the Facebook deal while it had the chance.
  • Yeah... anybody who has observed Apple's modus operandi for more than a year
    and does even the smallest amount of research could see this rumor is
    ridiculous.
    I still think someone will purchase Twitter, but it will be a company with a
    past history of a hype-driven move: Microsoft, Google, Yahoo!, etc. It won't
    be Apple.

    Zune + Twitter. Now that's a rumor I'd believe...
  • jcieplinski
    Microsoft buying Twitter makes absolute sense. They are fond of buying companies with a buzz, just to make it look like they have a handle on whatever new hot trends arrive on the scene. Microsoft is all about the amazing product they're going to release two years from now. But that product never seems to materialize.

    And they have scores of divisions within the company that bleed money every month.

    I only hope this doesn't happen, though, because I like Twitter, and I see any company that gets acquired by MSoft these days as a soon-to-be-dead company. This is the same reason I opposed the purchase of Yahoo!

    Microsoft is the past. It has no future. It is the Great Britain of the computer industry.
  • PacificGatePost
    As much as the rumor mill is pushing the Twitter acquisition story, it flies in the face of common sense.

    http://pacificgatepost.blogspot.com/2009/05/com...

    Apple is NOT eBay.

    Going all the way back to ’81 when Apple established an alliance of sorts with Logo Computer Systems for the Logo programming language that solidified Apple’s position in the world of education, the hardware manufacturer has a history of establishing effective relationships to solidify its market presence. Spending $700 million on Twitter doesn’t fit that blueprint
  • even i dont think apple has got to do anything with twitter
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