Costolo's departure was inevitable

SAN MATEO, Calif. — The end of Dick Costolo's embattled tenure as Twitter CEO was as unremarkable as anything coming out of the social media company of late.

While Facebook was wowing reporters and analysts with a virtual-reality demonstration of Oculus Rift today and while Apple and Google announced a raft of software updates for developers the past few weeks, Twitter was seemingly stuck in neutral.

They created buzz. Twitter produced zzzzzz.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg doesn't hesitate to tinker with the company he co-founded, like a mad scientist with a master plan. Google shoots for the moon with risky, ambitious projects on earth and beyond. Apple seems intent on diving into established markets and remaking them.

Twitter? Same look, feel and user experience. It's not a surprise, then, that the company's user growth was tepid like the product.

In what passes as innovation at the San Francisco company these days, Twitter on Thursday said it would lift a 140-character limit on direct messages.

So with Costolo finally stepping down and Jack Dorsey filling in as interim CEO, Twitter made a change that was long overdue.

"Unfortunately this news isn't surprising," Forrester analyst Nate Elliott said. "The bottom line is that Twitter isn't very good right now at serving either its users or its marketers."

Twitter's monthly user base will grow just 14% this year, slowing from more than 30% two years ago. By 2019, its user growth rate will be 6% worldwide, according to eMarketer. Put another way: Facebook has nearly 1 billion more users.

Complicating matters, investors had called for Costolo to step down after an earnings dud in the first quarter, and the company was predicting future sales well below its inititial projections as well as Wall Street's.

"I believe now is the right time for Twitter to focus on finding a new leader for the years ahead," Costolo said in a conference call. "You want to do these things when the organization is strong, when it's robust, when there's a clear plan and a clear path forward. And that's where we are today."

Not everyone agrees with that assessment.

Twitter has persistently struggled with profitability and while analysts believe Costolo was an adequate CEO, Twitter didn't roll out innovative ad products fast enough to make itself essential to people's daily lives.

Which brings us to Jack being back.

The charismatic, press-savvy Dorsey created the Twitter service and knows it as well as anyone. The scenario of co-founder riding to the rescue isn't exactly Steve Jobs coming to Apple's aid in the late 1990s, but Dorsey is the rare tech exec who innately reads the DNA of a company.

Things won't change overnight — it took Jobs a few years to whip Apple into shape — but Twitter took a step in the right direction.

Change is essential in Silicon Valley.

Swartz is USA TODAY's San Francisco Bureau Chief.