Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has always been open about the company’s plans, while Apple CEO Tim Cook has always preferred to keep secrets and loves surprising people (as people love it too). Business Insider considered why “Facebook likes to blab so much – and why Apple likes to keep its secrets.”
Cook takes a jab at Facebook?
There are many areas in which Apple’s rivals wish to do a lot, such as artificial intelligence, and they keep talking about it on various occasions. However, Apple doesn’t like discussing its plans much in advance, and “It makes Apple itself look like a slowpoke by comparison,” Business Insider says.
Cook told Fast Company last week, “So we don’t have a conference to show people a multiyear road map. We show people what’s coming now, and we try to get developers excited about what they can do now.”
Cook might not have intentionally made the comment about “a multiyear road map,” but it seems as if he is taking a jab at Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Recently, Zuckerberg kicked off Facebook’s F8 conference by showing off the company’s 10-year roadmap.
Why does one talk and the other doesn’t?
Facebook’s entire model hinges on encouraging people to share as much as possible with others. This makes it important for the social networking giant to at least appear to share secrets with the billion plus users who rely on it to connect with each other.
Even the mere appearance of hypocrisy would act like a poison to Facebook, which has huge ambitions of bringing the next billion users onto the Internet. If it fails to win the hearts and minds of its users, then that push will end even before it begins.
There are several things for which people rely on Facebook every day, such as communications with friends and family, storing and recalling personal memories, being the public face of their business and more. Making big changes without telling users beforehand can harm marginalized communities or force people to confront traumatic memories, the report says. Facebook has started recognizing the power it has and now understands well that it can’t do both: keep secrets and maintain trust.
For Apple, which makes phones, computers, watches and tablets, surprises can be good. No matter what the product is, the iPhone maker believes that surprise works better than transparency. Based on Cook’s logic, it means not to raise expectations about hypothetical future capabilities and instead focus on the current and the immediately next.
