1. You're left with an app that has stagnated in market share for a number of years (even dropped a bit)
2. Your brand has been marginalized by Facebook's vertical integration of your primary feature
3. You have some money left (investment, revenue, whatever - I don't know about Foursquares's finances, but they obviously have some money or they'd be gone)
Given the aforementioned, do you A) pretend like nothing happened and continue watching your brand fade into obscurity (e.g., MySpace), or B) try to reinvent (e.g., like MySpace did - their traffic topped 55M uniques/mo in 2014)?
Because of your #3, that means they had some time. Rather than torpedo something that was still a bit of a success, if no longer a moon shot, they could have innovated something new alongside the existing product. Either a compelling new feature or a separate product that was able to leverage their huge data set. Their users were delighted by the existing product, but they ignored their users in order to go with the torpedo route. Clearly they had never read anything by Paul Graham?
What it really comes down to is this:
1. You're left with an app that has stagnated in market share for a number of years (even dropped a bit)
2. Your brand has been marginalized by Facebook's vertical integration of your primary feature
3. You have some money left (investment, revenue, whatever - I don't know about Foursquares's finances, but they obviously have some money or they'd be gone)
Given the aforementioned, do you A) pretend like nothing happened and continue watching your brand fade into obscurity (e.g., MySpace), or B) try to reinvent (e.g., like MySpace did - their traffic topped 55M uniques/mo in 2014)?