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Thursday, April 1, 2004
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 Thursday, April 1, 2004
started 4/1/2004; 10:39:21 AM - last post 4/1/2004; 11:28:35 PM
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Doc Searls - Thursday, April 1, 2004 
4/1/2004; 2:39:21 PM (reads: 10260, responses: 8)
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Leveraged foolishness 
| | As a company-wide exercise in rhetorical restraint, Microsoft has challenged its employees to go "just one day" without using the words "smart" or "threat". Said CEO Steve Ballmer, "Y'know, after twenty years of chanting the same damn things to ourselves, I just got freaking tired of it". As part of a long-term plan to change the hyper-competitive culture of the company, Microsoft's HR department has quietly dropped its requirement that applicants submit their high school SAT scores, or to take the tests again if the original scores failed to meet company threshold requirements. "But we're still going to grade everybody on a curve," said a company press release. |
Alex Bennett gets Sirius
| | I first listened to Alex Bennett in New Yawk, when WMCA was a tawk station (here's the schedule) back at the turn of the 70s. Caught him again at KITS and elsewhere in the Bay Area when I lived there from the mid-80s through the 90s. Now Big Rick reports (from ba.broadcast, where Alex made the announcement) that AB will be on Sirius. The show will be on in the mornings, from New Yawk again, 6-9am on Channel 143. |
A birthday for the rest of us
Excuse me while I take this chain off my neck
| | Okay, here's what I wrote a few hours ago: |
| | Cuz, like, I'm sure it's a joke, right? Right? I mean, it's April the Uno. Foolishness time. |
| | But I just got a call from somebody on The Inside at Google. |
| | So, am I the only one who thought this was a joke? |
| | Just when I think I've given all the PR advice a former PR guy who's still a journalist can give, here's one more: If you're gonna shake the Earth with an unexpected announcement, don't pick the one day out of 365 (or this year, 366) when everybody's yanking everybody else's chain, okay? |
| | [Later...] As Bill points out, this is Google's actual joke of the day. |
Stern warning
| | Here on the Left Coast, the joke about Howard Stern being taken off the air is still on. As always, Jeff explains what's going on. Starring: the religious right, the fearful left, spineless politicians and tight-sphinctered regulators headed by Michael Powell, whom Jeff calls our "National Nanny." |
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Pat Breitenbach - Re: Thursday, April 1, 2004
4/1/2004; 4:41:05 PM (reads: 645, responses: 1)
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$1 says it's legit. It's a very Cluetrain-ish introduction, Doc. Surprised you're a skeptic.
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Billy Mabray - Gmail
4/1/2004; 5:11:31 PM (reads: 1161, responses: 3)
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I agree with Pat, I think this is real. It doesn't make very good sense to say, "Hey look! We're coming out with a great new service! April Fool's!"
Besides, this is Google's joke for the day.
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Doc Searls - Re: Thursday, April 1, 2004
4/1/2004; 6:59:48 PM (reads: 711, responses: 0)
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After getting calls even from people high up (I mean, like really high up at Google, telling me I'm fulla shit, I'm surprised too.
Fooled by facts, I was. Duh.
I won't even begin to tell ya'll what other mistakes I made today, unrelated to anything April Foolish. It's been long day and the morning isn't even over yet.
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Pat Breitenbach - Re: Gmail
4/1/2004; 7:16:26 PM (reads: 1214, responses: 2)
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Doc, you can PayPal me at pat_breitenbach at hotmail dot com.
And, actually, I think it was a pretty clever way to introduce the service. "1 gig of storage? Yeah, right! And I suppose they'll put ad words in, right? Hah Hah. Holy cow! It's real!"
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Doc Searls - Re: Gmail
4/1/2004; 7:38:22 PM (reads: 892, responses: 1)
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My wife said "Ads in my email? It has to be a joke!"
I told one of the guys who called from Google that I had over fifteen gigs of old email on my drive, not counting attachments. "Sounds like we need a premium service, then," he said. Good idea.
Man, what a long strange day this has been.
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Tyromaniac - Google and April Fool's...
4/1/2004; 7:48:02 PM (reads: 1116, responses: 0)
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Actually, I think it's brilliant to introduce an unbelievable offer in April's Fool. You get a lot of publicity. First the news, then the denial as a joke and then the denial of the denial... which ends up being a pretty good prank if you think about it...
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jayoung - Re: Thursday, April 1, 2004
4/2/2004; 3:28:35 AM (reads: 1232, responses: 0)
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Doc - I was thinking about this when posting my own on-campus comment about it - and while I have zero PR training - but to release this on April 1, an idea so radical that it created a significant amount of buzz and perhaps the most brilliant timing of a press release that I've ever seen. If this is true - and they didn't hoodwink the entire media (which would be the worst PR move I've ever seen) - a whole lot of people (including a lot of my IT peers on campus that liked to point out that it was a fool's joke) are going to wake up tomorrow and go "This is true?" "Why I'll be one son of a gun"
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Julian Bond - Re: Gmail
4/2/2004; 5:50:05 AM (reads: 1478, responses: 0)
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What I find really hard to understand is the flippancy of the press release. I simply can't imagine a company on the run up to an IPO putting sentences like this in a real release:-
- Search is Number Two Online Activity -- Email is Number One; "Heck, Yeah," Say Google Founders
- Millions of M&Ms later, Gmail was born.
- She kvetched about spending all her time filing messages
So what's going on here? Is it market research into the value of a Google webmail service, disguised as an April Fool, disguised as a real beta release, and fed with carefully targeted reinforcement via people such as yourself. And all with plausible denyability if anyone calls them on it? How many levels has this thing got?
They even fed the press on Mar 31 so that it would be all over the world on Apr 1, except that quite a lot of the online press published too fast on the same day and with no analysis or comment. The hacks simply paraphrased the press release without any attempt to question it.
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