Keller @ Large: Mark Zuckerberg Doesn't Get It
BOSTON (CBS) - I try not to make snap judgements about people based on their appearance, I really do.
But there's something about the sight of our cultural overlord, Mark Zuckerberg, the $46 billion Facebook king, addressing a major conference in San Francisco Tuesday in his ubiquitous T-shirt, that makes me laugh out loud.
Zuckerberg is now 31 and a father, old enough to drop the Peter Pan act.
But his adolescent mindset makes sense when you see what he envisions for the future of his money machine.
Zuckerberg is really big on virtual reality, what he calls "a whole new set of social experiences.... Virtual reality has the potential to be the most social platform, because you actually feel like you're right there with another person," he says.
Apparently, Mr. T-shirt was too busy making money to absorb the lesson of Google Glasses, the highly-touted product that met the previously unknown demand for eyeglasses that doubled as video cameras and computers.
It turns out there was no such demand, and the sometimes-violent objections to the wearing of these gadgets by other people who preferred not to be videotaped at all times led to the product's quick collapse.
That was real reality talking there, not Mr. T-shirt's make-believe reality.
He doesn't seem to get that Facebook works because it connects real people with other real people. It may be convenient to do business or get information from a machine, but it cannot replace socializing with a real person, seeing a virtual reality landscape is not the same as the real thing, and so on, and they never will be.
And that's something Mark Zuckerberg just doesn't seem to get.
Listen to Jon's commentary:
