A couple of weeks ago, I chanced upon a blog post, found by following a tweet on Twitter, where a couple of troglodytes from MySpace.com blamed their company’s downfall on Microsoft technologies and their location in LA.
I was immediately dismissive, as it showed that the MySpace staffers were complete morons who hadn’t thought to run pilots or scalability scenarios in order to determine whether their choices would scale. Moreover, Robert’s assertion that innovation only occurs in Silicon Valley was ludicrous, and totally underserving of any retort.
The truth is that MySpace’s strategy sucked, users moved on, and they suffer a fate worse than death in this Internet age: irrelevance.
As if that wasn’t enough, I came upon this article chronicling the comedy of errors surrounding Twitter, the current darling of instant time wasting.
The story is fascinating. Your first question is, “Where are the adults?” From there it devolves into astonishment and even, anger. Yes, anger. For you cannot fathom why there wasn’t anyone with authority who could have screamed, “no mas, no mas” to the absolute waste of, well, everything!
One great difference between the Twitter story and that of MySpace is the candor with which both stories are told. MySpace is the ostrich here, burying its corporate head in the sand, and not looking inwards in an attempt to resolve issues, whereas Twitter seemed to have learned from those mistakes and is looking forward.
Guess which one is still growing?
