“The story of Facebook’s first decade,” writes Time's Lev Grossman in next week’s cover story, “was one of relentless, rapacious growth, from a dorm-room side project to a global service with eight thousand employees and over a billion users, on whose unprotesting backs Zuckerberg has built an advertising engine that generated eight billion dollars last year, a billion and a half of that as profit.”Rico says no, screw you, Zuckerberg, because being rich doesn't make you smart...
With a set-up like that, you can imagine that Mark Zuckerberg might take umbrage at Tim Cook’s characterization of companies whose business models are built on advertising: “When an online service is free,” Cook wrote in September of 2014, “you’re not the customer. You’re the product.” The sentiment is hardly original, and when Cook wrote it he was probably thinking of Google, not Facebook.
But it galled Zuckerberg. “It was the only time I saw him display irritation,” Grossman writes.
“A frustration I have,” Zuckerberg said, before a PR handler can change the subject, “is that a lot of people increasingly seem to equate an advertising business model with somehow being out of alignment with your customers. I think it’s the most ridiculous concept. What, you think because you’re paying Apple that you’re somehow in alignment with them? If you were in alignment with them, then they’d make their products a lot cheaper!”
I don’t quite follow the logic. But then I’m not as smart, or as rich, as Mark Zuckerberg.
08 December 2014
Zuckerberg to Cook: screw you
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment