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Comment by surprisetalk | Hacker News Reader

There are many companies whose CEOs also want to be the mascot.

It seems to me that the intense, high-achieving traits of CEOs tend to make bad mascots.

A good PR team can spin some of these folks as "chaotic/troubled geniuses", but it seems like they don't even try.

Why don't they pay people to prevent things like this? Why don't they hire somebody unanimously likable to be the face of the company?

I think every company in the S&P500 needs to find 100 middle-schoolers and pay them to be a council of cringe. Cheap way to prevent gaffes like this.

EDIT: This video was a gaffe right? I'm assuming this link is notable because of how off-putting it is? Maybe I need to hire my own council of cringe haha

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Personally I thought it was interesting and a little insightful. This seems like exactly the sort of raw content that a PR team would otherwise filter down on until it was some bland, generic statement saying nothing at all.

Obviously mark is bias towards his own product, so I'd take it with a grain of salt, but the thought process is interesting to see.

Demo the Vision Pro and you will see the resolution gap is enormous and so is the visual stability and lack of warping. There are no weird laggy gaps in rendering. My Quest 3 crashed twice while trying to do basic things like play VRChat but my Vision Pro has not once crashed. My Quest 3 makes me nauseous in 15 minutes, but my Apple Vision Pro has never made me nauseous after many hours of use.

> This video was a gaffe right?

Actually, I found it to be the exact opposite.

My impression of Zuckerberg has never been great, and his public statements and appearances in the past haven’t done anything to improve that. My impression of him is basically as an overgrown frat boy that didn’t grow up when he should have.

His recent statements in front of Congress, Meta’s apparent strategy w/r/t AI, and now this video all seem to point to one of two things: either I was wrong about him all along, or he’s matured a great deal in recent years.

Whichever is the case, I came away from that video with more respect for the man.

Mark has always wanted to be Steve Jobs. I’d argue many CEOs want to be like Steve, but Mark has tried from very early on to emulate him down to a penchant for turtle neck and dad jeans for many of his appearances.

Steve, for his many flaws, was seriously charismatic and highly influential as a businessman. I can see why other CEOs hope they could have his stage presence.

Unfortunately, very few have that same charisma. Mark definitely doesn’t. But it explains why he tries to be front and center

He comes across like Bill Gates very strongly with the way he speaks and makes pauses.

even when Steve Jobs was saying stuff like "you're holding it wrong" i felt like he was in on the joke (self aware) about how ridiculous it was to say. i don't get that same impression of self awareness from Mark Zuckerberg

Minor nit (not trying to defend jobs, but it’s sadly a bit apocryphal) : he never actually said that.

The press event for that issue was specifically him saying that

1. They weren’t alone in having signal drop off

2. That you could hold it differently or get a case to avoid the issue.

The “You’re holding it wrong” was actually a wired article take on that deflection in the first point

https://www.wired.com/2010/06/iphone-4-holding-it-wrong/

If you watch the actual press conference, it’s very much more “Mea Culpa”

https://youtu.be/Q-UgUnMt6Ds?si=D5yyGvSq4n9sOof7

I felt I was watching an actual analysis at first. I thought Zuck was going to give Apple credit for some of the amazing work they've done. When he mentioned that "feature X" was better on the Quest that IMO wasn't better in Quest, I realized I was watching a bad marketing video. Admittedly, I couldn't watch the full video. It feels desperate.

What negative effects do you envision this having? This is a founder and CEO advocating for his product over a competitors in the marketplace.

Take his review with a grain of salt, sure, but am I supposed to believe Zuckerberg advocating for the Quest over Apple vision pro is some sort of blunder?

my takeaways were, he has a nice living room, the video captured from the quest 3 looks good, where is the teleprompter hiding, and there was no need to make a video saying he thinks his product is better

the video aspect was undermined by switching to the second camera view, probably not captured on quest 3, and a reminder that there's a pro post-production team making this look good

the main point of this video "quest is better" means nothing coming from him because they're his competition

i appreciate his PR shift in the past few years to be more "down to earth" and public about his thoughts. it makes him more like-able to me but it doesn't make a difference to my opinion about his company or products.

This is the least cringe I’ve ever seen Mark, and I’m pretty adamantly anti-Mark.

I put it much more charitably in my comment above, but yeah. I think we’re on exactly the same page here.

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