Microsoft Coffee
microsoftcoffee.org
microsoftcoffee.org
When I was growing up, my dad had visited Seattle and came back from the trip with a box of Microsoft Coffee. He claimed to have gotten it from a store called Egg-Head’s Software or Egghead Computing or something like that. (EDIT: Upon reading the full article it seems to have been Egghead Software.)
I took it to my computer club and was laughed out of the room for it being fake. I believe he still has it somewhere, in storage...
Needless to say, I have some friends to email given that I’ve been the victim of “my uncle works at Nintendo” style teasing about this for years.
I.E. we were dumb kids who would make things up to impress our friends. They weren’t trying to be mean, they were just incredulous.
One morning we were going to brew it but it was whole grain and we didn't have a grinder.
My dad was a fool for believing a random cashier's word that it was instant coffee!
Other than that, GP may have just been teasing. I mean what's the probability that you call them and they still have the same people there after 25 years? You call them and one of those rare guys (who's still there after 25 years) answers the phone. Or whoever answers the phone is willing to take the time to find someone who has been there since then. Seems unlikely.
It's unlikely that 'someone at the station' could confirm that clip was real, getting archive footage from that time would be difficult. I worked on various shows in the 00s, there's no way I'd remember any packages we broadcast, and there's no easy access to archives before 2008. We've been digitising decades of cut news packages in foreign bureaus for years, but I don't believe actual as-broadcast stuff on tape has been systematically kept, and we didn't have it digitised - at least long term - until about 10 years later.
However as much discussion we've had about the internet remembering everything, I can't find anything in Google to confirm "Microsoft Coffee" except for this site, discussion of it on Reddit 13 hours ago.
Honestly this prank makes more sense to me as a forgotten thing than as a modern meta-prank. I would not be surprised if Bill or some other prime mover from that era hears about it and confirms at some point.
In the 1990s they released "drag 'n' drops" - a gummy candy in the shape of dragons. I can't find any mention of them.
Stuff like this seems whimsical, but it serves the very serious purpose of allowing Microsoft to claim exclusive use of their name in that class.
Google has lost a lot of old posts from those days, but I'd be surprised if it would have lost all of them.
Its choice not to display any information older than the attention span of a cracked out chipmunk is one of the main reasons I stopped using Google.
"stale as buns" is my phrase of choice.
Perhaps, however remember the Mandela Effect. I'd expect ong time KOMO viewers and staff to recognise the presenters, and I'm sure they were the right ones. I wouldn't trust their recollection of this story though, especially once they had seen the video - after all the camera never lies.
Remember news anchors read dozens of these stories a day, to recall one specific prank 25 years later isn't likely. Unlikely KOMO still have recordings of their output from back then.
KING ran retractions for days, and did their best to bury the footage.
I saw it when KING ran it, and had a good laugh. It was an obvious prank (the video looked like a bad cut & paste job, and the reporters were local comedians from "Almost Live"), but too bad a handful of humorless people ruined it.
I ran into Bill Nye some years later and asked him about it, and he replied they got into a lot of trouble for it.
If you've waited for 25 years to announce something, you're going to get video captured correctly.
> There’s the KOMO News footage, which some of us still have on a dusty VHS tape
Does anyone from Seatle recognise the two KOMO reporters?
If the footage is a deep fake over real footage from that time, I'm very very impressed. I suspect that the audio is fake, sort of matches up with the real recording, and the box is digitally replaced.
From here, I looked up pictures of anchors who worked in that time period, and I see Eric Slocum (now deceased) and Margo Myers who did evening news together in that time frame, and look quite similar to the people in the video.
EDIT: someone else identified Keith Eldridge, who definitely looks like a match for the video.
I mean this assumes said perfect video exists. I don't think most people would go to extreme lengths to preserve a video tape of a prank they performed 25 years ago.
The video maight have been digitized years ago not yesterday.
I think a really good prank using deep fake tech.
maybe the tape degraded?
the rolling part of the tape is a little too much imo and a lot of programs have filters that add the grainy nature so it's not impossible. that and seeing as you can hire random celebs for 100 bucks nowadays to shout out at your friend it's not unimaginable that they faked this. it's probably true but also... who knows
Also, the recording itself is in a pretty bad shape, trying to sell you that it's a very old VHS tape that has been played a huge number of times.
My point being, this could be one of those instances where a prank happened before April Fools became a corporate marketing tool. It wasn't hidden away out of fear, but just sort of "because" that was how the internet worked back then. Not everything was digitized and made available for eternity then.
The vertical hold going as in the featured article was more of a 60s/70s thing in my memory.
[edit]
On a slightly different note, the HiFi audio track (supported for playback by pretty much all VCRs by the late 80s; not sure if/when HiFi recording became normal) of VHS was undoubtably the highest quality consumer analog audio product to get wide usage, with an SNR and dynamic range slightly better than the very best cassette decks.
The full link in the screenshot is this and it still works! http://www.pcweek.com/spencer/spencer.html
update: adding wayback link: https://web.archive.org/web/19960512211429/http://www.pcweek...
update 2: From the main link: "There are a handful of print articles from tech magazines at the time"
Turns out that the Internet Archive has a ton of computer magazines scanned in and there's a lot from 1996 so now I'm going down a rabbit hole both searching for any mention of this and also nostalgia: https://archive.org/details/computermagazines?sort=-date&and...
The fact I've spent some time actually looking this up though makes this the best prank of the last few years. The video especially is a masterpiece of fakery.
Like, maybe this inspired the prank somehow?
I would go with a fun joke.
There's nothing suspicious about that CA. If you do a search[1] you can see plenty certificates issued for benign sites. My guess is that's the CA for google related products? eg. GCP, app engine, or google site builder.
Youtube, SSL, domain, everything. April first. Also, humorously hosted on google.
host `dig www.microsoftcoffee.org +short | tail -1`
51.165.217.172.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer pnatla-aa-in-f19.1e100.net.Doesn't seem like it
But are we sure this is just some lame webpage? If the prank is to gaslight the internet into believing the Microsoft Coffee prank took place wouldn't the news segment covering the prank also be fake? I have no idea if that was the anchor for that TV station in the 90s. That would be way more entertaining to me than some press release or fake product page.
To the original question, the alleged original prank still outweighs any contemporary green screen antics: producing multiple physical fake boxes, distributing them across town in multiple stores, and getting local news to pick up on it. That's a lot of work.
Simulacrum, simulacra, ...
There were articles recounting April fools day pranks, but none mention Microsoft Coffee which is weird to me considering that it was covered on a local station.
As they explain, if you have evidence of abuse on HN, you should be emailing hn@ycombinator.com so we can investigate. But other commenters having different $BigCo tastes from you doesn't count as evidence.
All of those quirks and inside jokes were forcibly removed to assure customers and government agencies there were no 'hidden' code or features in a product - just the released, documented, and tested pieces of the product.
Released November 19, 1996. 7 months after Microsoft Coffee.
But I was still oblivious to what that gas attack meant, and what terrorism would mean to people in a few years after 9/11.
After the gas attacks happened, the other exchange students that all lived in the new foreigners dormitory (deep in the mountains outside of Kanazawa) planned a party. We put up flyers with a bear dancing with Asahara Shokou, the blind prophet of the cult. He was the Japanese equivalent of Osama bin Laden. The caption read "ore mo ikitai kedo naa!" ("Damn, I wish I could go too!") We thought it was really funny, since he had been arrested by that point.
The school administrators dragged us in, saying that "black humor, well..." We immediately took down all the flyers.
Sounds like the Microsoft PR people had the same reaction.
After years of direct, negative experience, I still routinely step in it with my "American humor", and then feel like an ass afterwards. Scarcasm goes over like a lead balloon.
> [...] Usually Microsoft was happy to take credit for clever pranks from employees, because it showed we played hard besides working hard.
> [...] 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.
I'm kind of flabbergasted that the authors, Microsoft employees it seems, were surprised that their prank wasn't perceived well, and lay the blame squarely on "PR flacks."
(Or maybe I'm 25 years younger in a corporate environment that has thoroughly taken control of this kind of thing.)
You're 25 years younger in a corporate environment that has thoroughly taken control of this kind of thing.
> 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.
He was pissed because, while a "joke", it was an valid and accurate criticism as well. Sun was miles ahead of Microsoft and many other companies, in several different ways. Microsoft dominated because Gates was a ruthless son of a bitch who repeatedly broke laws that were poorly enforced back then.
I had a whole tirade typed out, but I realized that HN is full of true believers in the "New Bill Gates". I'm not. He's trying to buy a legacy so he can overwrite the shit one he had when he was at the helm of Microsoft. Sadly, it'll work because people have short memories.
They crushed competitors with the motto "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish", where they'd start to embrace an open standard, extend it with their own customizations, and use that to crush the competition.
They tried to do it with Java, but Sun prevailed in a lawsuit against them.
Before that they crushed word processor rival WordPerfect (though arguably, WP did not handle the migration to GUI properly), and spreadsheet rival Lotus 1-2-3 this way. They leveraged their control of the Platform (Windows) to control any software market they wanted, such as internet browsers, crushing Netscape, leading to an anti-trust lawsuit [1] that almost caused Microsoft to have to split up (arguably saved by Bush Jr. being elected to office).
There was also the SCO lawsuit against Linux, but that was after Bill Gates stepped down from CEO, so it's at Steve Ballmer's feet.
Needless to say, he (& Microsoft) accumulated so much ill will that it basically required a generation turnover (as you've demonstrated ;) ) to forget.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
What shitty things did you do 25 years ago you're willing to let me judge current you on?
My point is, it's quite easy to make claims without proof. I know next to nothing about "new" Gates or "ruthless son of a bitch" Gates. Your claim that Gates has not changed needs some sort of evidence to be taken seriously.
Totally random example that I had _no involvement_ in: launching a tree survey app on the 20th of April that had insufficient moderation tools. I’ll let your imagination around this (totally hypothetical) scenario run wild.
Personally, I think the prank would have been fine if they filled the boxes with actual coffee beans.
> One morning we were going to brew it but it was whole grain and we didn't have a grinder.
Like when Microsoft employees put a big "E" on Netscape's lawn, which Netscape employees promptly tipped over and put Mozilla on top of it.
https://medium.com/@ddprrt/tales-from-the-browser-wars-mozil...
Also, the world was more naive before "re:all" emails from hr.
Visual J++ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_J%2B%2B
Google sunset - from now on each product will have a countdown clock on its webpage to its death which is either when the clock hits zero or the lead dev makes promo, whatever comes first.
Another easy target would be the release of the 16th chat application that’s even shittier somehow.
Now presenting: Google Hangups(tm)
Tolerating or even enjoying "make fun of yourself" humour feels important to me. How much sting you can take says something, and you need to build up a tolerance. If "jokes about the boss" are always of the bootlicking variety, those are the only acceptable jokes and decent people will just avoid humour.
It's a scale though. An ill advised joke can have scary consequences in China.. Poo. At the same time, crass WW2 jokes don't always go down well in Germany... and liberalism or democracy don't change this.
Anyway... MSFT, Amazon & such are heading towards East India Company market caps. At this scale (and at small scale too), I think a thick skin is essential to an open culture.
The concept of "corporate culture" is both bullshit and profound at the same time. OOH, it' the drab topic of dilbert land. OTOH, corporate culture is >51% of total culture. It matters whether or not corporate culture is open.
Microsoft basically from Gates' reign was a lot of, "Copy the shit that we see others do."
Ballmer at least had the audacity to attempt something original like the Xbox. Steve gets a horrendously bad rap, but if you look at Microsoft's products from the start of his time as president (1998) to CEO (2000) and until he was replaced by Satya Nadella, Ballmer was trying to provoke his people into something new.
Nowadays, Microsoft is actually an innovator making some really impressive products (the entire Surface line, Azure, etc.).
Gates is boring, bland, and a "genius" at realizing the future potential of technologies (Xerox's GUI, The Internet, mobile phones, tablets, etc.), but he absolutely sucks at producing something that will appeal to a consumer. I've said before that if you could combine Gates' understanding of future tech with Steve Jobs' ability to understand design and consumer desire, you'd have an unstoppable entrepreneur. The only other person out there who I think even comes close is Elon Musk.
MS didn't get a chance to 'support' this, these guys did the thing on their own.
If I'm MS I'm not sure I want to do a lot to "support" them after the fact as I really don't need groups of other employees stocking the shelves with fake products...
Any prank that looks like it has someone else's name on it, or approval... but isn't approved is just always going to have a risk associated with it.
Microsoft isn't a person or individual. For MS to support something...really means some hundreds of individuals inside MS support a thing and have coordinated to communicate that support to the other hundreds and BOOM, MS now supports a thing (or doesn't).
All of this is about permissions, ownership, and labeling. I'm inclined to think the corporate world has it all wrong.
MS supported this by virtue of MS employees doing it. MS was also schizophrenic about it and smited its left-hand for not properly filing a request in triplicate with the brain.
Would that apply to say crimes?
Should corporate then get to tell people what else they can't do since being an employee includes '<company name> support'?
I think you're inadvertently wandering into some really wonky territory.
Undoubtedly :P
As for crimes, I think the US legal system supports my view more than the one that clearly separates these employees from the MS entity. MS may fire the employees as a result of their actions, but up to a point, MS is fully liable for their actions as representatives of the company long before the employees are liable as individuals.
Not sure where you got "Even Bill wasn't happy with this"
> 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.
Good christ.
Please.
Please, I beg of you, PR teams, let us be free of corporate April Fools’ pranks. Make the world a better place.
Also think about all the additional work the PR people were forced to do to clean up.
I can assure you, this wasn't within the top-ten of most annoying things that a retail worker would have to deal with in a day; it's minor and harmless, and the people who really cause trouble for retail workers wouldn't be in a position to buy every Microsoft product on a whim, either.
Your problem is/should be with capitalism, not with a joke.
My take is that PR overreacted. They thought it was a mess, and they thought they needed to do Serious Damage Control or whatever. But they were wrong.
This was a well done hoax. A more competent PR team would have leaned into it and showcased how Microsoft isn't just a cold corporate monolith. That it has a humorous side, or is more "human", or whatever.
I hope shenanigans never dies.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Online_Forensic_Evi...
I can only imagine the repercussions of this.
But now it is too easy and there isn't the same cost. Personally I have decided not to bother with social media on April Fools Day because you know time is going to be wasted by sub par corporate efforts.
The director of our area, Network Engineering, was widely liked, and I'd worked for him, first directly when he was a manager, since 1997. Pretty chill guy, great sense of humor, effective leader. I particularly liked him because he gave my team, Network Management, all kinds of 'air cover' from the rest of the division, which allowed us to do our work in very non-standard but extremely efficient ways.
He happened to be on a business trip to WalMart.com headquarters in California.
So I used telnet to connect to the SMTP port of our main Microsoft exchange servers and issued the necessary commands: HELO, RCPT TO, MAIL FROM, DATA, etc, and forged an e-mail that looked like it came from him and was sent to the whole of Network Engineering, probably close to 100 people at that time.
The e-mail basically said that effective immediately, he was retiring. That it had been great working with everyone, etc etc. I took care to write the e-mail using the same phrases, words, formats that he normally used.
And it worked! Everyone believed he had sent the e-mail. My own manager, who reported to the him, was heard joking around with some other managers, saying that the director was clearly playing an Aprils fools joke on his department, and that they were going to get him back by taking the e-mail to HIS manager, a Vice President, asking for clarification.
My director was in transit or something and didn't see the e-mail he supposedly sent.
Some members of his very first team, the telcom support desk, knew him from way back and were horrified. They had his person cell phone number, and called him directly to ask him why he was doing this!
He was quite confused, and called his managers to ask what the hell was going on.
Once my manager found out that the director has NOT sent the e-mail, his amusement turned into anger. The director wasn't amused, because of the disturbance it caused, but he wasn't super upset.
So around noon, there was an emergency department wide all hands called, and my manager, very angry (but he controlled his emotions well) told everyone what happened, and said that the security team was involved, and that whoever did it should come forward.
So after the meeting, I went to his office and said I did it, that I didn't think it would cause any harm, etc.
So next week, I pressed him: what are the consequences going to be? He was vague, and still quite angry about it. Not abusive, or even passive aggressive, but I could tell.
When the director came back, I apologized to him, and he was fairly neutral, which I took as a pretty bad sign.
So this waiting game ended up going on for months. On intervals, I kept asking my manager what was going to happen, because at that same time, I'd just bought a nice property and house and moved in. Losing my job right then would have been a very bad deal.
In the end, nothing happened at all. Over a year later, I found out through some people I knew that my manager had spent months trying to get permission from HR to fire me. They refused...over and over again. And in the end, I didn't even get an unofficial reprimand.
But it was pretty damn stressful!
For the most part, that particular manager was fairly ok. I actually worked with him as a technical peer before he went into management, and he was super smart and effective. His personality was generally positive, and he was always pleasant to talk to.
But...he had a strong disciplinary streak to him. On the team he managed before my own, he got several people fired for making substantial, impacting but otherwise understandable technical errors. Those guys did goof up, and cause real problems, but the errors they made were within very technical, confusing and difficult processes. Specifically, related to the store relocation/renumbering flow, one where my team spent a quite a bit of time trying to smooth out and automate during and after.
No, he's not. There is no author name in the story.
Perhaps people are just upset that they didn't get it and are blaming Volkswagen to avoid admitting that they were a bit too gullible around April 1st.
I don't see how people could believe it's real though. VW is such a big company. how can people think they would rename to such a silly name.
They hardly have a monopoly on that opinion. Just lemon juice on the wound though, I suppose. Getting mad and indignant about it qualifies as "continuing to dig", violating the first rule of what one should do upon finding themselves in an undesirable hole.
I remember getting a box of MS dev tools with J++ included just a few years after this. It was already a well settled product.
Over time, I believe Microsoft started to implement Windows-specific functions that _only_ worked on their implementation. Eventually Sun sued and I think that's when they lost and had to re-name the product.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Java_Virtual_Machine
The author was probably misinformed, and that's a very likely reason for the overreaction of the PR dept.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210402174720/https://www.micro...
Little suspicious of the 16:9 aspect ratio. News broadcasts weren't wide screen until much later. Probably it is being displayed cropped?
Perhaps not too different, apparently.
It may not be that Google's pressure groups are more successful, but that the government actually has more interests in Microsoft's products and support agreements.
(HoloLens is on v2 and is expected to have long term support. Google Glass has been cancelled twice, and you claim it is rebranded now, but my search just now turns up Google Lens as just a phone app with no hardware initiative. Even if there is a hardware initiative with that brand name, that's still two cancellations and a confusing brand name change too many for most government contracts to trust. There are similar complaints about GCP versus Azure out there, though I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.)
Also, VS Code went from zero to > 50% market share, and Azure, Teams, etc are growing fast. GitHub is adding MS ecosystem integrations at a rapid pace.
I don’t think that adds up to a very bearish story.
Not in the PC market that's for sure. I tried Mac and Linux few times for work and I always found Windows to be far better, at least as a desktop/laptop OS.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Military_Standar...
I learned to love bad coffee from drinking it. Starbucks ruined everything. I wish McDonald's would bring back their battery acid coffee.
It seems they managed quite a decent April Fool's joke until boring old PR, sorry the entire Legal Sharks with frikkin' Lasers division dived in.
It should be possible to have a laugh locally.
When you weren't using it you could even put a music CD in it and it would play music right through your computer speakers!
https://sep.yimg.com/ay/yhst-39083765508394/thermaltake-x-ra...
An in-depth review of this unit
(For the record, I wasn't. I wasn't going to be doing much for-profit piracy on a dial-up connection.)
Later when they were cheap to buy used I think the piracy scene really picked up.
That said, this is a hilarious story and reminds me of the things people used to do in the early days of the internet in terms of trolling and such. Unfortunately, after groups like the GN*A and others successfully trolled the world several times, nation states figured it out and started trolling to actually control the narrative of the internet!
And here we are today.
If that's the best case scenario, what's the worst? Firing squad?
A prison sentence would not be surprising at all.
The only reason they likely didn’t get it in 1995 even is that MS PR (the one this person derides as PR flacks) apparently successfully convinced the world that this wasn’t done by MS insiders.
It is all about money today: serious business.
It was deserved.
the suits come in and ruin everything eh?
Extra hours aren't that hard to find here or there if you're never leaving.
This person is complaining about how Microsoft didn't enjoy this prank, which involved hours of planning (during working hours I assumed), cost actual $$$ (through printing these boxes), pissed off the Company's suppliers (by delivering fake products), and in which the entire point was poke fun at the Company as being a mediocre copy-cat?
Jeez, people really need to develop a sense of humor!
/s