Apple is “Evil” and Facebook is “a Photo-sharing Site”

Every company "believe['s] they know what is best for you and me." The entire point of a company is to create stuff that's best for the customer.

The original post on VentureBeat includes a comment from Fred Wilson himself. He was speaking at an event and was being a bit controversial on purpose.

I'm not sure I agree with his points on Google, while GMail was innovative(still is) I'd say Android is tearing up the mobile market and showing no sign of slowing down. Apple opened the door and holds a big piece of the pie but so does Android.

Also, the Pope is "Catholic".

When Fred Wilson speaks, you have to pay attention. He's nearly always got something interesting to say and agree or disagree, his opinion carries a lot of weight.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.

Evil is too broad.<p>Apple is machiavellian. As much as I dislike them who could fault them for that after their history?

I don't think you can call Apple "evil". Arguably you can call it "cynical" however.<p>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.<p>To explain the "cynical" part, I'll make a tenuous parallel to Thomas Jefferson who said the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.<p>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.