Why is this not working? The moment Steve Jobs couldn't work his iPhone

If we didn't know how seriously Apple takes its presentations, the technical hitches that interrupted Steve Jobs's introduction of the iPhone 4GS might have passed unnoticed. But here instead was the reigning emperor of technology unable to get his phone to work. For every iPhone user who has experienced dropped calls or snail-paced browsing, it was a gratifying instance of the biter bit.

As Jobs mumbled: "I'm sorry, guys, I don't know what's going on", one can only imagine what occurred next backstage, as employees scrambled to correct the situation.

It was reminiscent of the moment in 1998 when Bill Gates appeared live on CNN to launch the newest version of Windows. Just as the software booted up, it crashed, freezing up the screen. Gates stood there for a moment, his arms tightly folded, before saying with a tight smile: "That must be why we're not shipping this yet."

Earlier this year, the CEO of Sonim, maker of a supposedly unbreakable mobile phone, foolishly challenged a journalist to break one in front of an audience at a technology conference. The journalist dropped it into a water tank and it came out fine. He then whacked it against the side of the water tank. After three whacks, the phone's screen cracked. The shocked CEO, Bob Plaschke, held his broken trophy phone and said with a pained laugh: "You've actually broken the phone. That's impressive. That's absolutely impressive."

The verdict on Jobs's recovery from his wi-fi snafu was positive. He did not freeze. He did not follow the Gordon Brown Bigot-gate example and blame his assistant. He explained what was going wrong as it happened, thereby explaining his problem both to the audience and his backstage staff. He didn't fill the silence with blather but moved on to his back-up plan of using screen shots of the device. Later in the presentation, he came back with a solution: that the wi-fi users in the audience turn off their devices to create enough bandwidth for him to show them what they had come to see.

Jobs also benefited from having a well-disposed audience, eager to see him succeed. No one doubted that he had prepared assiduously for his presentation. So the wi-fi failure really must have been beyond his control.

One of the greatest examples of grace under pressure was the actor David Niven at the Oscars in 1974. Just as he was about to present an award, a male streaker ran out behind him and across the stage. Niven only just caught sight of him. And as the audience laughed, Niven remained unflustered and said: "Well, ladies and gentlemen, that was almost bound to happen. But isn't it fascinating to think that probably the only laugh that man will ever get in his life will be by stripping off and showing his shortcomings."