Commentary: Bill Gates and the Facebook CEO, both Harvard dropouts, appear in a video to launch the momentous news. Gates is a far better actor.<\/b>
Will the speech be performance art?
Can anyone teach those haughty Harvard graduates anything?
A dropout, perhaps.
Harvard on Tuesday said Mark Zuckerberg is to be its commencement speaker on May 25.
Some might find this odd. Zuckerberg never quite managed to finish his time there before he sought fortune.
Most commencement announcements are sober affairs. Harvard, however, has released a video to make this commencement speech more exciting.
In it, Zuckerberg appears with another famous Harvard dropout, Bill Gates. It’s supposed to be perfectly natural conversation in which Zuckerberg clutches his phone and suddenly gets invited to be Harvard’s commencement speaker.
Sadly, his acting isn’t quite of the Johnny Depp standard. Nor even, frankly, of the Bill Gates standard. Over the years, the Microsoft co-founder has become a pleasantly laconic presence in front of the camera.
Indeed, when he appeared with Jerry Seinfeld in much-maligned — but, to my eyes, quite excellent — ads for Microsoft, Gates more than held his own.
Zuckerberg isn’t known to be the most engaging of speakers. In this video, he asks Gates to give him some ideas about what to say.
Perhaps, too, Gates can help him with not trying too hard, something to which Zuckerberg is prone as a performer.<\/p>\n