Apple is “Evil” and Facebook is “a Photo-sharing Site”
gigaom.com
gigaom.com
The thing is, I actually also do believe Apple is evil, as is almost every business on our planet. Apple wants to protect it's assets by keeping a very tight control over the ecosystem around it's products. Pharmacy companies pay politicians to get their drugs approved. The tobacco industry has a great interest that it's products get smuggled. Insurance companies... don't get me started on them.
I am guessing what Mr Wilson meant was: "Apple believes to know what is best for me and gets it right more often than not. And after everyone bought their somehow superior product they only allow me to enter the market they created, if I play after their rules. And I don't like that. I want the freedom to sell any kind of software to people without someone babysitting me."
Well I don't know if he really meant that by saying "Apple is evil", but I do know that if one calls Apple evil, there has to be a new adjective invented for insurance companies, weapon producers and the pharma industry.
i think they are being a gatekeeper and i don't like gatekeepers very much. they aren't good for entrepreneurs and hackers
[1] At least, it can be used that way. It fits the Janitor model much better when using repositories to install programs, or at least what I imagine the Janitor model to be (weakly curated system with misbehaving applications removed).
[2] I'm also ignoring all of the less common/lower profile operating systems, because the only one I can name is BSD and I've never used it.
When the market works this creates an incentive that is very closely aligned with doing the best for the customer as well. But the market isn't perfect, especially the approximations of markets we have today.
I think Apple does legitimately care about satisfying their customers with their products, but they are just as capable of falling into the trap of treating their customers like passive revenue generators as any other company.
That being said, you also have to remember that Fred isn't just speaking as an insightful guy with a lot of experience, he's also speaking as a managing partner of USV. As an angel investor or VC it seems you most often are an advocate or evangelist for your portfolio companies.
He also disses Gowalla but Foursquare is USV-backed and Gowalla isn't. The counterargument is that Foursquare is a portfolio company and Gowalla isn't precisely for the reasons he cites but you have to consider the evangelism POV too.
As for Facebook, saying every Website (and indeed the Web as a whole) is a social graph sounds a little like equivocation to me. It is clearly the juggernaut in the room. Think of Facebook as the country in which you live and all these other Websites are local clubhouses. That's the kind of disparity we're talking about.
For many people FB is a photo-sharing site. For others it's a chat site and a site to pick up people. For yet others it's a casual gaming site. Often it's many of these things for people. FB is many things to many people.
Fred has also said that FB has basically won and it's here for a generation, which doesn't seem to gel has likening it to Flickr. Take that how you will.
Anyway, to borrow a term I heard from Mark Suster, I view all these location startups are FNACs (feature not a company).
Apple is machiavellian. As much as I dislike them who could fault them for that after their history?
Apple's philosophy is to make decisions for you, the consumer. Steve said exactly that in his D8 interview. Frankly, most people like that. Apple makes decisions about stuff most people don't care about.
To explain the "cynical" part, I'll make a tenuous parallel to Thomas Jefferson who said the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
Ultimately, people are responsible for keeping themselves informed, not creating monopolies, not giving too much power to certain people, governments or companies and so on so the Apple strategy is fanning ignorance because, let's face it, most people want to enjoy "freedom" without having to actually do anything about it.