Bill Gates Experiences Three Windows Crashes During CES Keynote

January 5th, 2005 at 2:00 PM - Conferences by Bryan Chaffin

During his keynote address for the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, NV, Bill Gates experienced not one, not two, but three Windows crashes and glitches while showing off new products.

The Las Vegas Sun reported that Mr. Gates first ran intro trouble when trying to connect a new Nikon digital SLR camera to a Windows Media Center Edition PC through a WiFi connection. The result, however, was a frozen computer that wouldnit respond. Two attempts later, however, the demonstration went off without a hitch.

The next one came during a demonstration of a new game called Forza Motor Sport, when the PC the game was being run on actually went directly to the famed Blue Screen of Death.

The third problem occurred when Mr. Gates was unable to get a Tablet PC to connect to the Internet.

All of the problems were met with good natured laughter from Mr. Gates and the audience, and Conan OiBrien, who was co-hosting the event, even quipped "OK, and right now nine people are being fired," during one of the crashes.

Earlier in the presentation, Mr. OiBrien also joked: "I got too drunk, I woke up with a hooker. Bill got too drunk, he woke up with an Apple computer."

His Windows troubles hearkened back to the days of Windows 98, when Bill Gates experienced a Blue Screen of Death during the Chicago Comdex keynote in 1998. That crash made headlines around the geek world, but did not slow the adoption of Windows in the market place.

Even Apple CEO Steve Jobs has had his share of trouble during a keynote presentation at Macworld Tokyo in 1999. Mr. Jobs was attempting to demonstrate the ability to network boot 50 iMacs from a central server, but the units simply didnit work.

More recently, an effort to connect a camera to a Mac on stage resulted in a similar failure during a Macworld keynote.