Epic Presentation Failures

This week Microsoft’s Build conference saw one of the most epic presentation failures since Michael Bay’s teleprompter failed at the Samsung CES press event in 2014.

Microsoft Vision Keynote

On Monday, Microsoft planned to launch their keynote event with a live demo by John Knoll and Andy Chaikin (unfortunately, you have to forward 52 minutes as it has been edited out of the shorter main keynote video).

These two industry veterans have given a presentation or two - John Knoll was one of the original developers of Photoshop, and Andy Chaikin (although his name was spelt Chaikan on the official Microsoft video feed) is an established space historian and author of Man on the Moon.

They kicked off the keynote by saying how they were going to recreate the moon landing with the power of Unreal Engine and Hololens 2 - Andy says “what made it possible is this” opens his arms and then jokes that doing a live demo is harder than landing on the moon. The two of them then say thank you, walk off the stage and leave a confused audience thinking it is part of the show. About two minutes later Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella continues, presumably where a successful demo had been expected to finish.

Not only did the failed opening ruin the start of the keynote, but references to moonshots and space scatter through rest of the presentations were totally lost on the audience.

What should they have done? Here are three ideas.

Preparation

The number 1 reason for presentation failures is lack of preparation. Normally, you would expect Microsoft to be thoroughly prepared, but if you can’t even spell the presenter’s name correctly, clearly you have not prepared adequately.

There is no excuse for lack of preparation. Sometimes deadlines come faster than you expect, and repeated preparation is the easiest thing to cut, in this case, there was a whole team preparing the presentation and they acted like amateurs.

Have a Backup Plan

Technology can be tricky and unpredictable, I learnt this several years ago when the battery on the laptop I was demonstrating died because the meeting had been put back several hours. Even if the technology fails, you should be able to talk about it. It may not be great, but it’s a lot better than nothing. In this case, a backup video could have been ready - it wouldn’t have the wow factor of a live demo, but it’s better than nothing and references back to this throughout the remaining presentation would make sense.

Explain What is Going On

The audience was confused, and the presentations continued as if nothing had happened. Why not step back take a breath and explain what has happened?

I guess it is embarrassing to explain that you didn’t prepare enough and you don’t have a backup plan; at that moment it may just be easier to just slump off stage.