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(via SFGate.com)

But while promoting what he calls the “digital lifestyle,” Gates showed how vulnerable all consumers — even the world’s richest man — are to hardware and software bugs.

During a demonstration of digital photography with a soon-to-be-released Nikon camera, a Windows Media Center PC froze and wouldn’t respond to Gates’ pushing of the remote control.

Later in the 90-minute presentation, a product manager demonstrated the ostensible user-friendliness of a video game expected to hit retail stores in April, Forza Motor Sport. But instead of configuring a custom-designed race car, the computer monitor displayed the dreaded “blue screen of death” and warned, “out of system memory.”

The errors — which came during what’s usually an ode to Microsoft’s dominance of the software industry and its increasing control of consumer electronics — prompted the celebrity host, NBC comedian Conan O’Brien, to quip, “Who’s in charge of Microsoft, anyway?”

Gates, who was sitting next to O’Brien on a set staged to look like NBC’s Late Night set, smiled dryly and continued with his discussion.

I’ve done product demonstrations, and it’s been my experience that it’s fairly simple to avoid such problems, even with buggy pre-release products by sticking to a well rehearsed procedure or at least concentrating on feature known to be fairly solid. One would think Microsoft knows their products well enough to avoid problems during a product demonstration, but then again, Microsoft software is known to be somewhat unpredictable.