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Microsoft Coffee

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The Last Prank Before PR Ruined Everything

On April Fools' Day 1996, exactly 25 years ago today, some Microsoft
coworkers and I launched a complex and costly prank. We printed up
hundreds of realistic shrink-wrapped boxes of a fake product,
"Microsoft Coffee", and snuck it into stores all around the Seattle
area. Customers were confused, retail was upset, the local news and
tech media covered it. So Microsoft's PR flacks freaked out and
covered it up. They scooped up all remaining boxes, denied Microsoft
did the prank, and downplayed the scale of it to the media, and
imposed a ban on real-world pranks, ensuring all pranks from then on
would need to go through them, as virtual press releases. I've been
carrying the secret for 25 years. Today, I'm coming clean. This is
the untold true story of a corporate April Fools' prank gone wrong.


Things were different back in 1996. Most software was sold on floppy
discs or CDs, in boxes you'd find at tech stores like Best Buy or
Egghead Software. Microsoft dominated tech back then, with as much
clout as today's Amazon and Google combined. But Microsoft had a
reputation, deserved or not, as more of an imitator than an
innovator.


So when my coworkers and I decided to pull a traditional April Fools'
tech prank, we thought it would be fun to poke fun at that
reputation. Sun Microsystems had just come out with Java, we thought
"Microsoft Coffee" sounded like a pale, tepid name for a me-too
product.


But two things made our prank different from other pranks from tech
companies. First, instead of just sending out a press release about a
goofy fake product, we wanted to make a physical product that someone
could hold in their hand, and ideally that someone on TV news would
hold in front of the camera. (With Starbucks becoming a national
brand, we might confuse local media into thinking Microsoft was
actually making a coffee-related product; that coincidence helped us,
because local news didn't really know what Java was.) And second,
unlike other pranks our prank didn't just say 'Microsoft is
successful but nerdy'. Instead, it fed the idea that Microsoft kind
of sucked as a company in some way; a lazy copycat.


These two differences would lead to trouble, but we didn't foresee
that. We were busy arranging a graphic design of the box, putting
easter egg jokes in the tech specs on the side, leveraging corporate
partnerships, and prepping to make a run of several hundred boxes
through one of Microsoft's production printing systems. This was not
only kind of expensive, but a commitment, a step that would in effect
put an official stamp from Microsoft on the plan.


Another two people were preparing for delivery, organizing a route to
drive efficiently to a number of stores, and to surreptitiously place
the final, shrink-wrapped boxes, including fake SKU barcode, on the
store shelves. By 2pm, after weeks of planning and design, Microsoft
Coffee was "real". In stores from Everett to Redmond to Tukwila. We
treated the Egghead Software store in downtown Seattle as a flagship.


Soon, enough customers around town did find (and even attempt to
buy!) the perplexing boxes that it created a buzz. We sent a
Microsoft press release to several local stations on the benefits of
Microsoft Coffee, a fax which was unauthorized by corporate
communications of course. A second fax from company letterhead
managed to get a small news crew to record a remote shot from the
Seattle Egghead store.


KOMO TV was the second to bite, and covered the prank twice. In the
late afternoon broadcast, the anchor described the prank, and then
said that Microsoft denied any involvement with it. As we watched the
broadcast live, we laughed at each other, speculating who, exactly,
KOMO had talked to. Then the anchor said "So I guess this [box] is
just... fake." And he showily dropped it in his wastebasket.


In the evening broadcast, the same anchor went through the story
again, although this time he didn't throw the box away. And this time
there were more details from Microsoft PR, about how Microsoft was
indeed working on "Java" (we weren't, exactly), and that the
Microsoft Coffee stunt was from outsiders. This was curious, and a
bit unsettling. Usually Microsoft was happy to take credit for clever
pranks from employees, because it showed we played hard besides
working hard.


Other news outlets and radio also covered the story, and by the time
we went home that night, we were quite happy at the impact. After
all, we had spent countless hours over the past month planning the
prank.


In the morning, we were giddy. But that feeling quickly turned to
fear, as we learned that Microsoft PR had actually flipped out the
day before. They had also called up stores and ordered them to hold
all remaining Microsoft Coffee boxes, as staff would come to collect
them.


By the afternoon, the legal department got involved. We started
piecing together exactly what had happened. When reports first came
in on the late afternoon of April Fools', BillG said, in effect, that
the prank was not in good taste, and that it made Microsoft look
stupid rather than clever - especially as a catch-up to Sun
Microsystems. We learned he was repeatedly calling the prank "in poor
judgement" in meeting and internal memos.


The PR flacks, on their own, tried to clean up and bury the whole
thing, out of fear that BillG might get really angry about it. (He
never did. Nor did Legal. In the end, it was all a huge overreaction
by PR.) PR sent out a targeted email warning about "very serious
consequences" to those involved, and that was enough to shut me up.
Especially since I had involved others, who had families.


But PR's plan to suppress the story only partially worked, so it
seemed fitting for me to share this story 25 years later, while there
are still some vestiges of it around. There's the KOMO News footage,
which some of us still have on a dusty VHS tape. There are a handful
of print articles from tech magazines at the time. And one of us has
the audio recording of the radio coverage. But most companies, even
media companies, didn't have any web presence in 1996, and many
magazines have no surviving print archives from before the late 90s.

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