The God of Demos is an angry god! There's a whole lot of smiting going on to strike down the unwary, isn't there Zuck?

You know when you have those ‘lightning bolt’ moments when it all falls into place and you see the world from a different perspective. Did we witness that last week with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg when he blurted out:

Try again. I keep on messing this up.

Well, yes Zuck - we’ve sort of being saying that for a long time, particularly when it comes to your Captain Ahab obsessions with the ruddy Metaverse delusion. But to be honest - I can be honest with you Zuck, can’t I? - I never really had you marked down as the kind of guy who’d go in for self-realization and even if you accidentally did, would we know about it?

In this case though, it was hard to avoid the moment, coming as it did in the middle of public pimping of smartglasses and their AI potential at the Meta Connect 2025 gig last week. To be honest, I learned a lot from his keynote, although possibly I may have taken away messaging that wasn’t exactly, well, on message, as it were.

My fancy was rather caught, for example, by the little insight into the domestic doings of the Zuckerberg household as the CEO told his audience:

When I watch TV, I pretty much always have the sub-titles on. I can hear fine, but I find that it just makes it easier to follow along.

I found myself nodding in sympathy here. Sub-titles would make it much easier to follow along with many an enterprise tech keynote address, although they wouldn’t necessarily make them make any more practical sense, of course. See, Connect  2025 for the necessary proof points here…

CRASH!!!!!!!

But what brought about what, let’s face it, wasn’t actually a long-awaited self-actualization on the part of the Meta magnate - that one won’t be happening in my lifetime I suspect - but rather an embarrassing dose of egg on face during a pitch that was supposed to be highlighting how jolly clever those Meta bods are and how excited we plebs should all be to able to buy into their vision. What a time to be alive, eh, when sunglasses from Ray Ban are the future of bleeding edge virtual technology.

Or they might be, if the demo had worked. We’ll never know, because the demo didn’t work, did it?  And here’s the main takeaway that Zuck needs to learn from his Connect 2025 experience - and the takeaway I guarantee he won’t be engaging with - the God of Demos is an angry and vengeful god and will smite you down. Those mighty tech titans who walk the Earth and set we lesser mortals right on the future of our world are as flies caught in amber when the God of Demos turns their attention towards them.

Now this is a lesson that I learned a long, long time ago. I’ve been and around the enterprise tech sector for 35 years now and it’s a learning that I’ve taken on board (painfully at times) from the perspective of someone watching the divine interventions on stage. So why in 2025, someone like Zuck still thinks he’s going to get away with it is beyond me...

I’ve only seen one CEO who universally got away with besting the God of Demos and that was Steve Jobs. Every other one - and I mean every other one, even the slickest of presenters, the smoothest ringmasters of the bread and circus phenomenon - has fallen foul at some time.

Now, some CEOs are good at riding out the onstage debacles - I remember Oracle’s Larry Ellison at one event just shrugging his shoulders, giggling, and blaming the problems on Microsoft Windows. He got away with it because he smoothly made a joke of the situation, blamed Bill Gates and hey, he’s Larry freakin’ Ellison, he gets to get away with it!

On the other hand, one of the most mortifying keynotes I ever sat through involved Gates himself. As some hapless Microsoft employee tried to get the crashed demo back on track, Gates just stood there on stage without jokes, the dead silence stretching out for an excruciating five minute as he stared balefully at the poor keyboard flunky, who became increasingly flustered. I felt so sorry for this poor guy, thinking to myself that doubtless only days earlier he had rushed home to tell his family,  infused with enhanced career prospect optimism as he was selected from his peers to be the guy on stage with Bill, doing the demo alongside the CEO himself. Now here he was, morphing in real time as we watched from demo enabler to unwilling blame hound.

He did what?!? 

So how did Zuck react to his own on stage crisis? Calmly, authoritatively, amusingly, charmingly? What do you think? It's Mark Zuckerberg! He did completely the wrong thing, of course, grabbing the one escape rope that he absolutely should not have been tugging on - he blamed the frickin’ wifi!

No seriously, he blamed the wifi. He said:

This wifi is brutal. Yes, I don't know. We'll debug that later.

Now, cursing the wifi is an occupational hazard at conferences. Like all of my peers, I’m a scarred veteran of attending enterprise tech events where a cloudy enterprise future of productivity and efficiency for all is laid out before us, a future belied by the sub dial-up modem speed of the wifi connection in the conference hall, which is limping toward matching the speed of an arthritic tortoise, but not quite managing to lap it.

That’s fair game when you’re performing in San Francisco’s Moscone Center or London’s Excel. Blaming the bandwidth you might just about get away with, although the inevitable question will be asked, ‘If you expected 10,000 punters to attend as you keep telling us you did, why didn't you allocate enough internet resource to match that number? Whose fault’s that?’.

But Zuck wasn’t on third party turf. He was pitching from the heart of the Meta empire, his own HQ. So when the connectivity on offer inside Meta itself isn’t enough to keep its own demo up and running properly, you really do have to ask yourself how the tech is going to cope if you’re sitting in Starbucks and using its wifi? Maybe best not to factor in the wifi at this point and beg too many awkward questions, eh?

But Zuck had his chosen path and he carried on digging:

You spend years making technology and then the WiFi at the day kind of catches you.

And:

You practice these things like 100 times and then you never know what's going to happen.

Ah yes, the self pity gambit…that always works so well…

My take

The above incident was the most hilariously egregious example of a pitch fail, but it wasn’t alone.  When demo disasters come, they come not single spies. There were other basic errors that Meta cheerfully trod all over as well, so this really was a text book exemplar of what not to do that might well come in handy as the events carousel starts spinning.

For example, as we never, ever tire of saying at diginomica, the best proof point for any tech pitch is a use case. Show, don’t sell is a rule of thumb that usually can’t go wrong. But make sure that the use case you’re showing us is something that the punters in the target audience, who are the people you’re really selling to, will relate to and understand in terms of how it impacts their working lives.

Zuck was on top of his brief here, of course…NOT! The demo may be lying in metaphorical  pieces at his feet, but he was still able to talk us through the potential of what we weren’t seeing with a relevant anecdote that we can all relate to:

I actually took a call on a jet ski a few weeks ago. It was great. I could hear the other person fine over the engine, and our advanced wind noise reduction makes it so that you can basically be standing in a wind tunnel and you'd still come in clear to the person on the other side. I mean the person had no idea, I was on a jet ski, which is good.

I think we can all empathise with that, can’t we?

One more time for luck - the God of Demos is an angry and vengeful god and will smite you down! There’s a reason that Tim Cook doesn’t launch the new iPhones with a livestream, isn’t there. If the Children of Jobs have learned to fear the pantheon of discord, what makes you think you’re going to beat them, eh Zuck? (And anyone other blasphemers...)