Mark Zuckerberg tells staff to dump iPhones in tiff with Apple’s Tim Cook

This is fake news and just another one of the many press hate-pieces on Facebook, either because they're generally angry that Trump won and need someone to blame or because Facebook has a major part to play in the continued destruction of their industry. There's no indication (even in the original NYT article) that Zuckerberg being annoyed with Cook and him telling his leadership staff to use Android phones are remotely connected.

In fact, the justification for the request (as noted in the NYT article) had nothing to do with Tim Cook's comments, but was rather because "the operating system [has] far more users than Apple". Which, taken separately, is an entirely reasonable request. Why wouldn't you want to have your leadership team experience your product the same way most of your customers do.

When I was there android use was encouraged because there are a lot more android users in the world so for dogfooding it makes sense.

90% of the company used iPhones anyway.

> "[Cook] has consistently criticized our business model and Mark has been equally clear he disagrees."

I'm fed up with some of Apple's recent choices, so I'm no Cook fanboy, and I actually like Facebook -- seriously, I enjoy using it and find it adds real value in making/maintaining some connections.

But I rolled my eyes so hard at the above statement; the idea that consistent disagreement with Cook's criticism is somehow an adequate response to the misaligned incentives of Facebook's model is bullshit to the point of being an insult to readers. So is the idea this is merely a disagreement.

Facebook as constituted over its lifetime has deeply built-in incentives to sell out users. An adequate response would show a deeply searching reckoning regarding that along with the strength of proposed solutions. In absence of that, it's easy to suppose the real reason why FB leadership "disagrees" with Cook's rather apt criticism is that it preserves a position that makes them influential and rich.

Recent news revealing that FB apparently sees this primarily as a PR problem to be approached by discrediting critics means that it's extra hard to believe there's even a genuine attempt to care about their users in any other sense than as an asset.

I continue to believe in the potential value of tools like FB, but at this point, I'm not sure FB's leadership would be worthwhile stewards of a 7/11 from a social trust standpoint, and it may well be the model itself is adversarial.

Well I am willing to help anyone with XS dump it.

Reminds me of a time when Steve Balmer got upset over iPhone use at Microsoft.

Seems like a toxic work place.

Surely they should all be using a Facebook Phone?

Whatever happened to that device?

Yeah, good luck with that.

What a fucking man-baby.

One thing I have always hated in places I’ve worked is any culture of “competitor hating”. You probably know exactly the sort of thing I mean - the pervasive message that your company is better, and your products are better because your team is better and the competitors are all shitty and only idiots would use them, and if you could only get customers to understand how much better your product was then you’d have the whole market, and…

It results in this toxic mindset where people, teams and companies begin to believe their own hubris. Sometimes, our competitors are better than us. Sometimes that advantage is fairly achieved; sometimes it isn’t. But it’s always seemed to me that it’s more effective to have a relatively neutral and objective view of the market and competitors - realising that sometimes you can learn valuable things from them.

I’m sure it’s mostly a disease that affects smaller teams, but larger companies are not immune.