Apple Brings a Bazooka to Facebook’s Gun Fight

I really like M.G. Siegler’s reaction to Facebook’s full page ads that ran on Wednesday in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post, that carried the headline “We’re standing up to Apple for small businesses everywhere.”

Look, Facebook has a point in that these changes will likely make it harder for small businesses to effectively use Facebook’s ad-targeting system. But what Cook is pointing out is that Apple isn’t cutting this off, they’re just making it more clear to end users what is going on to serve up those ads. This morphs Facebook’s argument from a positive one to a negative one. Facebook is arguing that Apple needs to keep doing things the old, opaque way. Sure, that would mean less choice for consumers, but that lack of choice would be better for small business — is a tough argument to make.

Cook shifted the battleground not with a competing ad, or an op-ed, but with a single tweet. Facebook thought they were bringing a gun to Apple’s knife fight. But Apple was actually bringing a bazooka.