What was the one thing Twitter, the micro-blogging social media platform, and Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, one of the greatest disruptive thinking and audacious entrepreneurs of our times, did not have till a week ago? Competition!
Now, with his own rival platform called Threads, Mark Zuckerburg, the founder of Facebook, and owner of Meta, the largest social network ecosystem on earth — comprising FB, Instagram and WhatsApp — has provided that very missing piece of the jigsaw puzzle to Musk and Twitter.
Life in the tech world can change in a week. Since the time Twitter was created and launched in March 2006, from San Francisco, California, the platform — its noun form has become the verb — signifying the highest level of public approbation and cultural conquest by any technology product in Silicon Valley — has enjoyed a kind of monopoly within the broad social network umbrella.
Launched less than a week ago, Threads has become one of the fastest growing tech app ever. Aided by an automatic login and profile switchover facility to catalyse adoption and recording over 100 million users in five days, it has ended Twitter’s monopoly in this niche space.
Duopoly and an intense rivalry between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg in this space — earlier, there were talks of them wanting to organise a real, physical 17th century duel — would help enlarge the space, bringing in more users, greater adoption, higher and faster levels of innovation, more funding and improvement. And help everyone.
Ask Coca-Cola or Pepsi, how each one of them has fed from the keen competition and rivalry provided by the other, and how together, they kept an industry going for decades.
The last great tech rivalries — Microsoft versus Google, or Apple versus Microsoft, or Microsoft versus the Open Source movement — have all helped and aided the growth of the technology industry. Let us Tweet, and Thread, till the last word is said on both or either.
