Thursday, May 26, 2011

Square: Jack Dorsey's Second Act?

(Article first published as Square: Jack Dorsey's Second Act? on Technorati.)

As I was watching Jack Dorsey call cash registers "ugly" the other day at TechCrunch Disrupt, I found myself thinking, is Square Jack Dorsey's second act? Is he getting to do with Square what he was not allowed to do with Twitter?

I think so. The Founder CEO is a rare animal, but it is my favorite animal. All the trailblazing companies I know have had Founder CEOs. Twitter stands in stark contrast to Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg has relentlessly pivoted, he has relentlessly added features. What used to be The Wall became The Stream. We now have a like button to press. There are Facebook Comments at blogs. Twitter, by comparison, stagnated. There has only been scaling and a little bit of monetization.



Twitter never really came up with the cash register substitute. Twitter does not do a good job of spitting back the tweets at all. It is a decent broadcasting tool, but only an okay listening tool.

Square is a pretty fundamental product itself, and Jack Dorsey is back at Twitter as its Executive Chairman. I am still hoping he can pull a rabbit out of the hat.

Jack Dorsey, no doubt, is a leading tech entrepreneur of the Web 2.0 era. He is an inventor. Square is just getting started. In a blog post weeks back I called it the white people's microfinance. Twitter is also just getting started.
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