They have created an ecosystem - and a brand - that just works, works well for 90% of the people, and does so in an elegant and distinctly "futuristic" way.

This is inaccurate. Apple's business model is to sell things to people who buy products and services from them. It's no different than Microsoft's. Really, if you want to know why Skype sucks so hard it's because Microsoft doesn't really know how to monetize something they aren't billing users for. Frankly, the business model of most... businesses has been "I sell things to people who use them" since the dawn of capitalism. The aberration is advertising, and the Internet sucks for advertising.

Facebook does not have a good business plan. It has a business plan that was hastily taped onto the back of a running cheetah, and the cheetah doesn't care about the business plan.

This is also inaccurate. Facebook's business plan is to sell its users to advertisers. So's Google's - Tim Cook was probably referencing Facebook (that "social dilemma becomes a social catastrophe" bit is too on-the-nose by half) but his description of engagement at all costs and radicalization could just as easily point at Youtube. For what it's worth, when you're one of Google's or Facebook's customers your experience is very different than when you're a member of Facebook or Google's aggregate sales. You got a problem with a Facebook ad? There's someone who will fix it for you within the hour. Your Google Adwords gone awry? There's a chat line for you. I use GSuite for my personal email and I have a couple services running on Google Cloud. If money is going from your wallet to Google or Facebook they treat you like a customer. But if there's no money link from you to Google or Facebook you are not a customer.

So much of this upset over Google and Facebook is sheep bleating about being fleeced. Google and Facebook don't care, shouldn't be expected to care, and cannot be compelled to care - by the sheep, anyway. every privacy advocate out there has been saying "if it's free, you aren't the customer you're the product" since Netscape, FFS. They've also been saying that nothing short of a cataclysm will change anything. You'd think Cambridge Analytica would have done it. Instead we were all too busy arguing about terrorist brown people, no doubt because Facebook's board is 99% conservative assholes.

Here's the dumb thing: Facebook's future is fundamentally tied to Libra. They know advertising is fucked because they're creating an online tower of Babel where nobody's microcommunity talks to anyone else and they don't have the scalability to keep your product from being advertised to white nationalist pedophiles. They also know that their money traffic is moving from Facebook to WhatsApp, where they can't really advertise. So they altered their terms of service to tie your Whatsapp conversations into their ad network and everyone lost their shit. So they put out ads saying "apple is mean" and Apple politely told them to eat a dick.

Because fundamentally? Facebook needed to pivot from "our advertisers are our customers" to "our users are our customers" and because they got hammered by their shareholders when they rolled out Instagram Stories, they couldn't. so now The Squad has a cryptocurrency bill that basically says "get fucked, Libra" and India has a cryptocurrency bill that basically says "get fucked, Libra" and there is no one - no one - who has any trust for anything Facebook has done for the past five years and you know what?

Tim Cook is testing the waters.