Identified but the top list who can afford to buy the company is a small list, oracle, microsoft, ibm. But who once the behemoth sale . We will talk to brent. The board has to make a decision and their decision is to evaluate that decision an offer on the table so that is why they engaged the experts to look at offer. The business that shows tremendous topline growth and also a business that has zilch forprofits, zilch over the last five years of cash flow and if you look at what we know, you look at growing the business they do it by expensive acquisitions and spending a boat load of marketing and thats why theres no markets or historical cash flow. They will want topline growth at the expense of a lot of earnings and a lot of money. You have covered sales for a long time and you share my skepticism. I think its going to be tough to pull this off. This is the largest deal every tech. We also know that mark has done a great job and i think coulter is a big thing to him. We already know that oracle is basically, we think, has said no. We think microsoft could be there. There are only a couple that could consume something this large and the historical precedence of this happening hasnt not happen. Emily we are going to dig through some of the possibilities, but you said large text doesnt work. Hp compaq, oracle, would this work at this even happened . Everyone is running to the cloud and people who might are behind my think this is a way for them to get ahead. Having said that, i kind of agree that the math has to work and it will be very tough for large Legacy Tech Companies to explain this to their shareholders and how the synergies are going to work and how the bottom line will not get impacted by this. Emily lets walk through some of the possibilities and discuss. Cory an analysis of what the growth rates are for these companies and what they would be if you believe the chief analyst, like brent, who will predict what sales forces will do next year. Looking at next years numbers, for example, oracle is supposed to grow 1 topline year. No one is going to buy a salesforce because they dont want more earnings. It salesforce does what it is predicted to do which is slow down and grow 20 , the merged company will grow it 18 on the top line. The earnings per share would fall by 17 , so oracle would have to be really to dilute itself by nearly one quarter to earn less money to see the topline increase. Emily it sounds like oracle is not interested party. We dont think they are there. It would take 55 billion to 57 billion to get this done. They wont have cash for anything else. Emily what about microsoft . Cory is someone going to raise debt to do this with companies that have the cash to do this, will it be some combination, what price . My calculations are based on the current cap it as raised on salesforce and im not going to guess. Emily lets talk about microsoft because microsoft, to me, makes the most sense. What kind of company would want this . They dont have a big Cloud Business, maybe they would want to change the landscape of they of the way they discuss things. Right now, microsoft is projected to grow at a percent. If they added salesforce as revenues against a slower rate which is another reason they might want to do a deal, but 15 sales growth is what the combined Company Might show. Earnings per share is going to take a big hit and fall 60 for microsoft and it would dilute the company by at least 12 if they did in all equity deal. Microsoft makes the most sense. They have the cash, number one. Number two, i think, coulter early in makes sense. I was at the conference yesterday emily we are at the same ceo conference earlier this week. A lot of ceos share the same view that he is doing the right thing. I dont believe that marc would show up if he did not believe in these things so i think the way they are going to make a lot of sense. Emily ibm . In the case of hp and ibm, to companies that are similar businesses which are slinking hardware, selling services and selling a good chunk of software. Youve got companies that want to say we want to be in the software world, so hp is going for the split of the company and there is no way they can do a split and an acquisition. They probably cant afford an acquisition like this anyway. It would be Something Like hp compaq or a marriage of equals or Something Like that. That is hard to imagine happening but it would help them grow topline or not shrink topline as much as they are supposed to. I think ibm is interesting. When we look at ibm, it is a company that talks endlessly about cloud and they went all kinds of things for the Cloud Business and they like to make the argument in press releases that their Cloud Business is huge and bigger than salesforce is an bigger than anyones. Their sales growth is it supposed to decline by 10 but it would only declined by 3 and the earnings be worse because they have declining earnings. It would take one third of ibm to buy a salesforce. Emily this seems to ambitious or bold. I dont know. I dont think hp or ibm are in the next. Cory ibm cant do it. They cant are of money to do this. They dont have the cash to do this. We spent so much money emily by process of elimination, microsoft is the only real contender. Is that what we decided here . Cory we have seen it deals that are hard to imagine in the past and we will surely see another one. Projection probably has gone pretty well with the exception of the role. Hp compaq we saw time warner by a well. Emily that did not work out too well. Cory Bloomberg Intelligence brent joining emily and i. We will be right back talking about twitters disastrous Earnings Report. Cory im cory johnson and this is the best of bloomberg west. If twitter in trouble after a rough Earnings Report . They have struggled to maintain their Strong Revenue growth and stalling user growth. Twitter thinks they will address some of the anxieties of the instant timeline is something called, why you were gone. Dick costolo was asked when we will see results from these new initiatives. The reality of Software Development is even launch something and you reiterate and he gets to a better place sometime down the road. Our advertising targeting which are highlighted on the poll yesterday is something that when we very first launched in a few years ago did not work spectacularly. It has got to mend a sleep better and i think the same and have every confidence it will happen here. Cory i was just reading a bunch of tweets by a venture capitalist arguing that twitter is hitting the biggest problem of helping people tune their feeds. Tuning your feed and helping people get over that were twitter really becomes invaluable and he was saying that he thinks algorithms do that. That twitter being able to use the service more effectively. Do you agree with that . Dick first of all, there are a variety of opinions and what you really need to do is x. When i think about instant timeline and we think of it solving the, how do you use twitter russian mark instead of seeing a blank screen when you login, there is a collection of tweets that we collect based on what you are interested in. I dont know how to use twitter challenge we love that strategy and we believe in that product and we love the engagement we are seeing with the first launched, we just a two reiterate on it and we are confident we will do that. I do think there is a place for duration. Human driven duration of moments. Curation of moments and events. I think that plays works for logged out users. For example, two nights ago when the events of baltimore unfolded, they were people live broadcasting that on paris scope so you felt immersive week in the streets of what was happening in baltimore. Across twitter, there were local authorities, of religious officials, people on the street talking about what was happening. And you think about manually curating experiences and bringing that content together and showing people quickly this is how you get value from twitter, i think there is a place for manual duration curation. Lets talk more about periscope. The company is based in San Francisco and you said one million users how big does it scale . How do you get beyond that group of journalists, public, people inclined toward exhibitionism . Dick we are already seeing crossovers from some of the all Online Platforms which i think is great. Frankly, one of our hypotheses when we bought the company before it launched one of my favorite things about periscope is it you have these prelaunch hypotheses about what is going to happen and how things will unfold. For example, at least when we bought the company, we thought we knew there would be all these cases that we cant even imagine that will start to unfold and we are already seeing them. For example, we are seeing fine vine stars starting to collaborate using periscope to broadcast. That kind of crossover is great that brings together two video assets. When you think about those in projection with niche, our service business, and it helps build online career and you have a great ecosystem of assets that you can build audience for across the twitter ecosystem. I think the future of native mobile video is nasas and we love is massive and we love the way we are positioned. Lets take a step back. It really did feel these past few months you all were building credibility and momentum with wall street with great addict announcements. Was yesterday a setback . Do you feel like you and your team lost credibility . Dick i dont think we lost credibility. We have been very forthright on all of our calls and investors with what is happening, what were doing and how we think about things over the longterm. You have to have a longterm plan and stay focused on executing it. If you start trying to constantly over correct and you have to do this crazy thing in the next few weeks that is going to take us off of our longterm plan but get us to tuesday, i just think that is where you lose your weight and that is where people your way and that is where people think you are not focused on the longterm or Strategic Plan for the company. That is no way to run a business, so we have a strategy, we are sticking to the strategy, we like the strategy. Everyone is on a needed to the board, to my Leadership Team they are all behind it, focused on the same thing can we have to keep investing on it. Do you feel any pressure as ceo . Dick if anyone tells you the ceo of a company with any number of investors, private or public, that says they dont feel pressure is lying to you. Of course you do. Do you worry about job security . Dick no. The board and i are totally aligned. The pressure is from the team. An entire group of people looking to you to lead them and you want to be successful and rally everyone together and articulate the motivation of why you have to be successful and show them that those efforts are paying off, so that is where the pressure comes from. Last question yesterday, other than the lead, which sounds out of your control, is there anything you would have done differently to lessen the surprise on the revenue and forecast for next quarter . Dick i think that we constantly talk about how we are communicating with investors and the market and about the product and what is happening. I was supportive and 100 behind and led the way of the way we did that and i think we made the right decisions. Cory dick costolo with bloomberg business. Twitters earnings were reported about 15 minutes before the close of the market. The Company Called celerity circulated the numbers after they were published early on and asked that website. They got the numbers next to a data crawling program. The program that scrapes and for more about this searching technology, i talked to ceo of former chief scientist. Its actually a fairly trivial technology and probably about timelines and code and something for programming student could write. What a clever about this is that the folks who wrote it looked at the url structure and able to figure out what the likely structure of the next press release would be. Just a number incremented, so they wrote a little bit to explore. The bot does essentially what you do when you load a page in your browser, a goes to a new web address and simulates that at much faster than doing it by hand. Cory so, basically if the url was Investor Relations twitterq2, relations investor Investor Relations twitterq3, with the results come up . Exactly. I think it was the release id and some numbers and they were able to increment that number, Something Like less than 400 visits to get the new press release. Cory is this work Something Like the cracker programs that hackers use when they throw word and number combinations to test whether a password is going to work . A little bit like that in the sense you are exploring, but in this case, the page was public and had been published to the website. It has not been linked to get. It is not the same weight as cracking programs are. Cory how i want to phrase this question carefully and i can think of how to do it on a level of stupidity, how stupid was the nasdaq for publishing this early . Or is this a really Great Program and almost any company could have caught off guard by this . I think in the fact it is not that stupid but it is something people should be aware of in the design of the applications. If they use sequential id numbers or and ideas better incremented, they are likely to be vulnerable to this kind of thing. A lot of companies do it. Cory hilary mason, the ceo of fastforward labs. We will be back with one of twitters cofounders. Cory this is the best of bloomberg west pickup by cory johnson. The former twitter ceo Evan Williams. In stark contrast with twitter williams is focused on simple design aesthetics to medium users. We sat down with williams at the design summit this week in San Francisco to discuss the secret of beautiful design. Williams we tried to look at this, what some people consider solving a problem with how you publish text and pictures on the web and we looked at it from a fresh perspective and said, how do you do that for todays world which will be global focused. We have better Browser Technology with apps in multiple places and we just built from the ground up. It ended up looking different than most of the web does today. Was that in any way to reaction to the designs of the things you have created before . For example, it behaves and looks in a much different way than medium does. Evan williams twitter is about real time, very short blips of content that was originally designed around medium was not necessarily for longform stuff but for longer form stuff. We wanted to create a great reading experience and a great writing experience. The white house has experienced medium as a way for president obama to speak directly to constituents. How did you find out about that for the first time . Evan williams that was surprising. We have been really fortunate with that and a bunch of other highprofile people who have found 80 him to beat the best place to share their stories and ideas. From what we heard from people at the white house, they there are lots of places to publish online and there are very few where your ideas and words stand up above the navigation and likely the advertising that is crowding out the experience. Folks like president obama, elon musk, professional writers feel comfortable publishing on medium. What are you doing to make it more accessible to everyday folks who may feel a little selfconscious about expressing themselves . Evan williams the original idea was medium was open to everybody. We knew that not everybody had the inclination to publish anything longer than a tweet but we wanted to really create the best place for those who did have that desire. Really, lower the barrier. You dont have the overhead or the commitment required to publish a blog, which is pretty much the other alternative that people have if they want to do something more substantial than social media. The point was really to create the easiest and simplest store for everybody. We have had a lot of high profile people and really professional content. But the vast majority of it comes from normal folks. A lot of people who are unknown and become really big on medium. We are really trying to span the gamut and i believe is the whole becomes greater than some of the parts. It is one of the few places where president obama right and he wrote this message to millenials and how millenial came on and broke the response. On edm, a response is not just a comment that is below, it lives on the same level. Response got a lot of pickup. One of the other areas you are focusing efforts are on the business side. It is a traditional cpm model to focus on what matters with time spent of an article. What kind of response are you getting in the Advertising Community . Evan williams its going great so far, mostly experimental. We are helping brands publish on the platform and instead of measuring by region or number of eyeballs, which is really we are measuring by the time people spend reading which is not the perfect measurement at the value delivered, but we think it is a much closer proxy to whether or not people are really getting something out of a story than just whether or not they saw it or loaded in their web browser as you know, can be for two seconds before they move on. On twitter, your cofounder you are a cofounder, on the board of directors, and perhaps, not the best day in twitters history in terms of the Early Release of the financials and subsequent decline in the stock are you disappointed . Evan williams well, no one likes to see a stock fall like that, but honestly, i have the utmost faith in a longterm business of twitter and it usually gets caught up in ups and downs of stock markets but the team and business are building right now and optimistic. Cory Evan Williams with brad stone. We will be right back with more. We will talk about apple there he interesting Earnings Report. The very interesting Earnings Report. Just because im away from my desk doesnt mean im not working. Co