Analyser: Twitter går mot samma öde som Netscape

Netscape var ett företag som grundades av Jim Clark och Marc Andreessen som även utvecklade den första grafiska webbläsaren Mosaic och möjliggjorde en spridning av internet till en bred användargrupp. Universitetet som de utvecklade Mosaic för, insåg Mosaics värde och började kräva upphovsrättigheten till Mosaic. Jim och Marc tvingades då starta företaget Netscape och deras nya program Netscape Navigator (NN) blev den mest populära webbläsaren under 1990-talet. Utöver webbläsaren har Netscape utvecklat en tidigare mycket populär webbserver. Netscape köptes upp av America Online i mars 1999. Företaget Netscape förknippas nästan helt med sin webbläsare eftersom den varit deras huvudsakliga produkt. Netscapes webbläsare har fortsatt att utvecklas, version 9 släpptes under 2007. Sedan version 6 har den baserats på källkod från Mozilla.

Twitter (/ˈtwɪtər/) is an online social networking service that enables users to send and read short 140-character messages called "tweets". Registered users can read and post tweets, but those who are unregistered can only read them. Users access Twitter through the website interface, SMS or mobile device app. Twitter Inc. is based in San Francisco and has more than 25 offices around the world. Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, Biz Stone, and Noah Glass and launched in July 2006. The service rapidly gained worldwide popularity, with more than 100 million users posting 340 million tweets a day in 2012. The service also handled 1.6 billion search queries per day. In 2013, it was one of the ten most-visited websites and has been described as "the SMS of the Internet". As of March 2016, Twitter has more than 310 million monthly active users.

Salesforce.com (stylized as salesƒorce) is an American cloud computing company headquartered in San Francisco, California. Though its revenue comes from a customer relationship management (CRM) product, Salesforce also capitalizes on commercial applications of social networking through acquisition. As of early 2016, it is one of the most highly valued American cloud computing companies with a market capitalization above $55 billion, although the company has never turned a GAAP profit in any fiscal year since its inception in 1999. It is listed on the New York Stock Exchange with the symbol CRM and is a constituent of the S&P 500 Index.