So as far as Steve Jobs' keynote addresses go, this last one at Macworld Expo Tokyo wasn't particularly memorable-- or perhaps we should say that it's one that Jobs (and the rest of us) will be trying hard to forget. First of all, there weren't any crazy new surprises: no information about the consumer portable, no surprise introduction of the upcoming "101" PowerBooks, still no formal unveiling of QuickTime 4, etc. For Apple watchers, a Jobs keynote without any surprises might as well be handled entirely by worldwide marketing dude Phil "Second Banana" Schiller. But what really made this keynote a downer were the repeated hardware and software failures during the demonstrations. After all, we bet that Bill Gates still has nightmares about the USB-related crash during his Windows 98 demo at Comdex a while back, though in his dreams the crash is probably followed by a long fall onto a big pile of tens and twenties. Jobs, on the other hand, doesn't have fifty billion reasons to feel better, and we suspect that he has higher expectations and standards than Mr. Bill. We wouldn't be surprised if his public humiliation leaves a trail of pink slips in its wake.

According to a MacWEEK article, the first crash happened during Ben Waldman's demonstration of Japanese-localized versions of Internet Explorer and Outlook Express. Waldman, as faithful viewers will recall, is Microsoft's Macintosh Business Unit manager, and he's trotted out on stage at damn near every single keynote as the Token Microsoft Mac Guy to smile broadly, crack wan jokes, and impress us all with how Mac-friendly the Redmond Giant has become. (Of course, email by Waldman suggesting that Microsoft threaten to cancel development of Office for the Mac unless Internet Explorer became the default browser in the Mac OS has been entered into evidence in the "Redmond Justice" trial, but that's a different story altogether.) Anyway, his demo crashed, at which point Waldman blamed the hardware and said that "one of the greatest things about the new G3 is the reset switch on the front." Mmmm, there's a guy Apple wants on its side, right?

As if that weren't bad enough, Jobs returned to the stage only to have his own demo fail. Jobs was "visibly angry" when the fabulous Wall of iMacs™ failed to display streaming video from a G3 running Mac OS X Server. (Alert viewers will recall that this exact demo went off without a hitch at last month's Expo in San Francisco.) "What is going on, I have no idea," said Jobs. "It didn't work as I planned." At that point, Cranky Steve thanked the crowd and walked off the stage-- after which, the demo started working properly. All in all, not a shining moment for Jobs or Apple. We'll forgo our predictable musings about corporate sabotage and the like and just take a moment of silence for the poor ex-Apple employees who just got it in the neck...