Tech firm pulls off marketing masterstroke
(Updated twice, after the jump. Also, see YouTube video of Jeremy White.)
I have long been an admirer of St. Paul-based CodeWeavers and its Windows-compatibility software.
Its CrossOver products let Macintosh and Linux users install and run Windows applications with (this is big) no need to also install the Windows operating system. (Other Windows-on-Mac options do require the Windows OS to be lurking somewhere in the background.)
I've written about CodeWeavers on a number of occasions and used its software, which remarkably lets me run Outlook and other Windows apps on my Mac OS X desktop, not flawlessly, but productively and reasonably reliably. This a major technical achievement, and worthy of recurring tech-press coverage.
I have little patience for marketing gimmicks foisted on the media in the hopes of snagging free ink, however, so I refused to play along when CodeWeavers pulled its latest publicity stunt. In a nutshell, CodeWeavers head Jeremy White last July promised to make his software free for a day if and when each of the following occurred:
- Gasoline prices dipped below $2.79 in the Twin Cities
- A gallon of milk came down to $3.50 in the metro area
- U.S. non-farm employment reaches 138,002,001 (or one more job than at the start of this year)
- Twin Cities median home values reach $233,000 (where they were at the beginning of the year)
- Osama bin Laden were to be captured.
When, lo, item #1 came to pass, White had to make good on his offer (which is open to all comers through midnight today).
That's when all heck broke loose, and made me pay attention.
CodeWeaver's servers got slammed almost immediately -- beginning shortly before midnight last night when the firm began offering the free downloads. Word spread quickly, from Digg and The Unofficial Apple Weblog, among other tech blogs, to Linux user groups and other places where geeks interact.
"It went everywhere," White said. "That's what crippled us."
CodeWeavers had to pull down its regular site and put up a streamlined version that continued spitting out serial codes. When even that didn't work, as of early this morning, the company stopped generating codes (only offering the downloads) and took names and addresses in order to send out the codes later.
Downloads were running at about 60,000 an hour as of this morning, and were projected to easily top 1 million by late tonight, White said.
He isn't sure why demand has been so high -- unexpectedly and mind-boggling-ly high -- but observed that "people just respond really, really well to 'free.' " That's especially true of notoriously frugal Linux nerds -- but downloads have been running about half and half, Linux and Mac, he said.
White said he went along with this publicity ploy, hatched by his Haberman and Associates public-relations firm and backed by his VP of sales -- with reluctance. He, too, isn't particularly keen on marketing gimmickry, and he worries about the long-term sales hit.
He's scrapped future giveaways based on the other criteria on his short list.
But he's excited about the visibility for his Windows-compatibility technology after laboring in relative obscurity for years.
"Now a million more people will know about, try it and hopefully enjoy it," he said. "If one percent of those become paying customers, this will rapidly pay for itself."
Update: Here's a detailed recap from Jeremy White:
It was a great experience; I have emails from friends telling me stories of coworkers who learned about us for the first time because of this.
We did eventually find the root source of part of our troubles, and it's a bit embarrassing; we had a database server that, when it booted 292 days ago, only initialized one CPU core. When rebooted, it came back up on the proper number of cores, doubling it's throughput. That was a large part of the reason we couldn't keep our planned web site up.
We had actually planned on having a simple site in place for the day, which included more information, and could process the serial codes live. That site just wasn't quite simple enough, especially since we were running at only half speed.
Once we shifted to plan C (just capturing emails and serving up downloads), everything was fine. In fact, our third party content delivery service (Panther Express) never missed a beat; they streamed out copies of CrossOver at very high speeds.
So I'm proud that, even though we did have a hiccup for an hour or two in the morning, we did our level best to fulfill our end of the bargain and I think, by and large, we did.
I guess in hindsight we should have been better prepared for this. We were thinking we'd get maybe 50,000 downloads, at the most. So basically we weren't really braced for a firestorm quite as large as we received. If we'd had plan C ready the day before, we could have avoided an hour or two of delay (which is what it took us to shift from plan B to plan C).
Cheers,
Jeremy
Update: Here's the final tally from CodeWeavers, with reaction from Download Squad. And here is a video of Jeremy White on the giveaway's sometimes-horrific effects:
