Zuckerberg questions Apple’s alignment with customers

In response to Tim Cook’s comment, Mark Zuckerberg Takes A Jab At Apple and says Its Products, Services Are Overpriced

The recent streak of attacks between the CEOs of Facebook and Apple has brought a rather interesting subject to our notice; the fairly recent concept of businesses which generate revenue through ads. In response to Tim Cook’s comment about Facebook thinking to customers only as a product, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that there is no way to justify how one company is more customer oriented than the other. In a recent interview with Time magazine, Zuckerberg said that charging customers for products didn’t make Apple a customer based company, at least not any more than Facebook which is a free, ad-supported business.

This came in response to Tim Cook’s statement which he made back in September while he was explaining Apple’s approach to security and privacy and said “A few years ago, users of Internet services began to realize that when an online service is free, you’re not the customer. You’re the product.” Quite evidently, Zuckerberg didn’t take this jab, aimed at ad supported businesses, too well. We were expecting a reaction from Google rather than Facebook because the comment was a subtle hint at Google.

Zuckerberg thinks that Cook’s comments about ad supported businesses didn’t quite make any sense. However, when he responded, he didn’t seem to have mentioned Apple’s name in his statement. “A frustration I have is that a lot of people increasingly seem to equate an advertising business model with somehow being out of alignment with your customers”, says Zuckerberg.

He also added that if Apple really did chose alignment with the customers then it would make its products cheaper. Zuckerberg’s idea of Facebook is to connect people from all over the world and he says that “you don’t do that by having a service people pay for.”