We were surprised to see that Microsoft’s Surface tablet crashed during its public debut members of the media witnessing the event failed to cover this rather embarrassing glitch. [To be honest, we sort of missed it too, althought we posted the video yesterday. Ed]

Steven Sinofsky, president of Microsoft’s Windows and Windows Live Division was the first person to crash the new highly anticipated tablet. While showing off the Surface tablet to the public for the first time and demonstrating Internet Explorer, he makes a few finger gestures that clearly don’t have any effect on the tablet, which appears unresponsive. Make sure to watch the video of a keynote from 13:35 till 14.40 to see for yourself.

To make things worse, he turns the tablet screen off camera hoping to launch the video application and finally after a few tries runs off the stage to grab a new unit.  The new demo unit doesn’t refuse to go to the home screen and it finally lets him Netflix. Hooray, this is the way to present the new product, take note Apple. To be honest it was not nearly as embarrassing or amusing as Bill Gates’ legendary Win 98 moment, but it is still worth mentioning.

This is possibly one of the reasons why Microsoft didn’t let any journalists touch the actual device since it looked quite crash prone, or at least it tends to go unresponsive. Any such incident witnessed firsthand by bloodthirsty hacks would just embarrass them.

To be fair, Surface should launch in October, giving Redmond four months to work out the kinks and polish the Surface, no pun intended. For Microsoft’s sake, we hope we will not see any public crashes or freezes by then. You just don’t demonstrate something that is not ready, we hope Microsoft will look up to Apple that does not have a history of such flops.

Just make sure to watch it here, fast forward to 13:35.