In what is undoubtedly the most embarrassing failed product demo since Larry Ellison's nonfunctional NC, this morning Bill Gates was caught with his OS down. He was in the middle of showing the upcoming Windows 98 to a large Comdex crowd when suddenly the whole thing came crashing down around his ears. The seedy details may all be found in an InfoWorld Electric article.

Gates was apparently demoing Windows 98's support for a USB-attached scanner when everything went kablooey. What we find particularly telling about this little fracas is that we highly doubt that Gates was giving this demo without it having been scripted and rehearsed many times before the show. If, in such a controlled environment, Windows 98 is still unstable enough to publicly embarrass the richest man on the planet, that doesn't bode too well for the stability of the shipping product. Since it's slated for release on June 25th, that only allows perhaps six more weeks worth of work on it before it has to be sent to duplication. Even product manager Chris Capossela admitted that they "still have a lot of work to do," as he quickly worked to restore the system after the crash. And that only tells us that it's business as usual in Microsoftland: ship a product loaded with bugs and guarantee upgrades for years to come. Geez, a ZDNet article even lists some of the problems that Microsoft apparently hopes to fix-- like "the product's complexity." Good luck. Isn't that the sort of thing you want to catch in the design phase?

Incidentally, we still haven't heard of any features that make us particularly interested in checking out Windows 98. Multiple monitors? Yawn-- been there, done that. USB support? Well, okay-- now all you need is a USB-equipped computer; and Macs will support USB soon, too. Being able to use a web browser as the interface to your file system? Yecch. Call us when NT 5.0 is ready to ship and we'll take another look-- until then, we'll be waiting for Allegro and Sonata.