The Best of Both Phone, and Tablet
SNL honors Jobs, snickers at Zuckerberg, Netflix
Saturday Night Live, in a spoof Charlie Rose skit, offers a Steve Jobs roundtable. In it, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg admits he's presiding over a mess and Netflix's Reed Hastings seems so meta as to almost be himself.
"Saturday Night Live" this weekend offered a very tearful eulogy to the late Steve Jobs, sung to the tune of "Candle in the Wind" and accompanied by traditional funeral dancers from Bulgaria.
Well, perhaps privately. Publicly, however, the show decided to offer an amusing contrast between Jobs and some other luminaries (or lunatics) of tech.
So it presented a spoof of a Charlie Rose tribute show, with Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Netflix' Reed Hastings around a table, accompanied by Arianna Huffington of AOL.
Of course these weren't quite the real luminaries, but, especially in Hastings' case, some might wonder.
As always with "SNL," some parts are (a lot) funnier than others. Who, though, cannot at least hum to the idea of Zuckerberg declaring how Jobs had taught him how beauty could be brought to technology?
How do you apply that elegance to Facebook.com?" asks Rose.
"Oh, I don't," replies Zuckerberg. He admits that Facebook is "a mess" and "like the bulletin board at the local coffee shop."
While Huffington offered that her publication stood for many things, especially photos of boobies, Hastings was upset that Jobs had set "an annoyingly high standard."
"We suck right now," Hastings offers with alarmingly charming disarmament.
Where Jobs rejected several iterations of the iPhone before he saw one that felt right, the contrast with Netflix was stark, he says.
"We don't reject any ideas at Netflix," he tells Rose. Well, except some of the good ones, perhaps. Oh, and one of the less good ones in this skit was a startlingly unfunny Rupert Murdoch.
