Men and women who built empires during the industrial age controlled supply. Today, the legends of the digital market focus on one core attribute to success: influencing demand (i.e. the users). When you have those users in abundance, you can unlock new vistas with ease. Why? The most important feature in a digital platform is that it has many people therein. Provided that exists, most other things become tangential.
ChatGPT would not have wowed the world without its fusion with Microsoft which has the data. And any competitor must have such datasets to have any chance. And that explains why building models and algorithms without data may not cut the tape.
I used to use Dropbox until Microsoft added OneDrive in my personal Microsoft 365 package. Even though Dropbox was better, the marginal benefits could not be compared to the fact that I have my Office, backup, etc in one place. And that was the same reason why I posited that Instagram does not need to make great versions of SnapChat to remain relevant; it needs to have something good enough to stop people from leaving for the next thing!
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Why this chronicle? Elon Musk unveiled a new vision today: “ Musk has in the past said his acquisition of Twitter would pave the way for X, which he envisions as “an everything app” — a la China’s WeChat — for things like payments, booking and messaging.” Yes, Musk has “killed” Twitter and unveiled something even better which can serve the western world in the way WeChat has served China.
When this product is launched, it will have close to 240 million users from Twitter. If Musk’s team can soup the ecosystem with payment, booking, messaging, etc at scale, considering that Twitter is already the global digital square, massive disintermediation will happen for PayPal, Booking, and more. With this, the $20 billion market valuation which Musk has priced Twitter may look low now considering that Musk is likely to execute the new playbook.
X Corp is a great unification and may be a new specie of digital companies (yes, super app) in the western world. As it is being incubated, PayPal, Stripe, WhatsApp and Booking must evaluate their playbooks because its impacts could be industry-shaping.
Twitter becomes X Corp. Twitter Inc. doesn’t exist as a Delaware-based company anymore. Elon Musk registered two new businesses in Nevada in early March, then applied to merge those Nevada businesses with two of his existing companies, mandating that the one known as X Corp. fully acquire Twitter, Slate reports. The SEC-recognized name for the Twitter purchase’s $13 billion bank loan is known as Project X, and Musk has previously said this purchase will help create an “everything app” named X. (Fortune)
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I saw where he tweeted X yesterday, but I didn’t check further. The man Musk is a media house on his own, whatever he tweets travels farther than most news organizers.
Well, our own is to watch things play out, and cheer him when he succeeds. Anything that makes payment seamless, irrespective of currency, will always win hearts.
The Twitter reincarnation and evolution is afoot…