So today's the day Dick Costolo actually walks out the door at Twitter and Jack Dorsey slides back into the CEO chair he got pushed out of back in 2008. "Interim," they're calling it, which is one of those words that everybody understands means "probably permanent, we just don't want to jinx it in the press release."
I've been on Twitter since sometime in 2008 (I'd have to dig through old archives to find the exact month, and honestly I don't care enough to do it right now), so I've technically been a user through both Dorsey eras already. First one lasted about two years before the board decided Ev Williams should run things instead. Now here we are, seven years and one very different Twitter later, and he's back.
Costolo announced he was stepping down back on June 11th, so this isn't exactly breaking news at this point, it's more like watching the actual handoff happen. What I keep coming back to is the Square problem nobody seems to want to say out loud in plain terms: Dorsey is still CEO of Square too. Square, which by all accounts is gearing up for an IPO at some point. You can't tell me running two companies at once, one of which is trying to go public, is a normal arrangement, "interim" label or not. I get that founders get a lot of benefit of the doubt (see also: every profile of him that mentions he bikes to work and takes ballet, like that's relevant information), but this is a weird spot for a public company's board to have landed in.
What actually needs fixing
The thing about Twitter in the summer of 2015 is that the product problems are pretty well understood by anyone who uses it daily, and none of them are mysterious. New users bounce off the onboarding because the timeline makes no sense without context. The 140 character limit is fine, I actually like it, but the way replies and retweets eat into that limit for no good reason is dumb and has been dumb for years. And the growth numbers have basically flatlined for a few quarters now, which is the actual reason Costolo is gone, whatever the official framing is.
None of that is a Jack Dorsey problem specifically. It's a "the product hasn't meaningfully evolved its core mechanics in years while Facebook and Instagram keep shipping" problem. Whether the guy who invented the thing in the first place is better positioned to fix it than an outside hire, I genuinely don't know. There's an argument that founders see stuff other people can't. There's an equally good argument that founders get sentimental about decisions that need to be un-made.
Small aside because I can't help myself: I still miss TweetDeck as a real desktop app before Twitter bought it and folded it in. I had columns set up for like six different searches and it was genuinely one of the better pieces of software on my machine at the time. Anyway.
I don't think today changes much about how the app actually works tomorrow morning. Nobody's timeline looks different. What it does change is the story the company gets to tell about itself for a while, and Dorsey is a much better storyteller than Costolo ever was, whatever you think of the operational stuff. He's got the aesthetic down (the minimalist thing, the "designed in California" instinct he brought to Square) in a way that plays well with the tech press.
Whether that translates into a Twitter that actually grows past the roughly 300-something million users it's stuck around, that's the real question, and it's not one anybody answers on the day the new guy's badge gets activated. Ask me again in six months whether "interim" turned into "permanent," because at this point I'd put money on it either way and feel fine about losing.