When I was at Meta (then facebook), people lived and died by the live demo creedo.

Pitches can be spun, data is cherry picked. But the proof is always in the pudding.

This is embarrassing for sure, but from the ashes of this failure we find the resolve to make the next version better.

Yep I hope that mindset never dies. Meta is one of the last engineering-first companies in big tech and willing to live demo something so obviously prone to mishaps is a great sign of it. It's not unlike SpaceX and being willing to iterate by crashing Starships for the world to see. You make mistakes and fix them, no big deal.

why did they choose to air this live?

For an internal team sure absolutely, but for public-facing work, prerecorded is the way to go

One of my internships was preparing Bill Gate's demo machines for CES. I setup custom machine images and ran through scripts to make sure everything went off w/o a hitch (I was doing just the demos for Tablet PC, each org presumably had their own team preparing the demos!)

Not doing it live would've been an embarrassment. I don't think the thought ever crossed anyone's mind, of course we'd do it live. Sure the machines were super customized, bare bones Windows installs stripped back to the minimum amount of software needed for just one demo, but at the end of the day it sure as hell was real software running up there on stage.

If it was pre-recorded we’d know it was staged and that assume they didn’t have a working product.

Their actual result was pretty bad, but, ya know, work in progress I guess.

Watch their big "Metaverse" presentation where its all vaporware and faked, presumably this is a cultural shift from that era.

I saw Jobs give a demo of some NeXT technology and the system crashed and rebooted right in the middle of it. He just said “oops” and talked around it until the system came back up.

i love jobs but i do remember the “everybody please turn off your laptops” presentation.

live demonstrations are tough - i wish apple would go back to them.

Totally agree. Up until a few years ago failures during live demos on stage used to be a mark of authenticity, and companies playing recordings was always written off as exaggerated or fake. Now all of Apple's keynotes are prerecorded overproduced garbage.

"At least it's not faked" was my main reaction, too. Some other big-tech AI-related demos the last couple years have been caught being faked.

Zuckerberg handling it reasonably well was nice.

(Though the tone at the end of "we'll go check out what he made later" sounded dismissive. The blame-free post-mortem will include each of the personnel involved in the failure, in a series of one-on-one MMA sparring rounds. "I'm up there, launching a milestone in a trillion-dollar strategic push, and you left me @#$*&^ my @#*$&^@#( like a #@&#^@! I'll show you post-mortem!")

I appreciate the live demo but I'm suprised they didn't at least have a prerecorded backup. I wanted to see how video calls work!

Considering there's no camera pointing to your face they can't be all that interesting.