If you have visited the Pingdom homepage in the last few days, you have seen a 404 error message instead of our regular homepage. However, it is actually a campaign where we have changed the error message from “404 page not found” to “404 price not found” (see the image below).

We thought this was a fun and clever way to illustrate how frustrating it can be for an end user to receive an error page instead of the intended page (since it is one of the things our service can detect). Of course, in this specific case the message is positive, not negative.

This campaign has received a lot of feedback both from new visitors and our existing users. Most of it has been very positive, but the campaign has also caused some amount of confusion with some of our customers who at a quick glance thought it was a real 404 error page. (After this we actually took the safe route and sent out a brief email informing our customers that no, we are not having a problem.)

We thought it would be interesting to share a fraction of both the positive and the negative emails we have received so far. Some loved it, some hated it (very few, thank God), and some were just really curious how it was going. (A lot of people who didn’t say anything obviously also liked it because we have received a lot of new customers.)

Love

This is brilliant. Give the girl or guy who thought of this a raise! Love the idea!

We removed an f-word…

A creative ‘geek’ *must* have thought that up!

Big ups!

The people behind Pingdom definitely belong in the geek category.

I cursed and then I realized it was a GOOD error message. Great idea!

Hate

This 404 error and your email have caused some panic for me.
Pingdom is a critical system for me and emails from you trigger alarms.
Please don’t do it again.

We were really sorry about this one.

I would fire your marketing director – horrible idea.

Ouch…

And the really curious

I really want to know how many support queries you get about this

Conclusion

The thing is that normal, everyday advertising can easily be quite boring and we wanted this one to stand out from the crowd. We are creative people and like to be a bit playful, but we will think twice before doing something similar again. Why?

A lot of people got the point and loved it, but some people really didn’t get it at all. This is of course always a risk, but we really had no intention of confusing anyone. In retrospect we should perhaps have been less subtle in our approach, even though the campaign as a whole has been a definite success.

Microsoft and open source, those are two things that traditionally don’t mix. Quite the opposite; the more hardcore members of the open source community tend to view Microsoft as just one step below Satan.

But while much of the open source community has little love for Microsoft, Microsoft is actually trying desperately to send some love back. The Redmond giant may have its own business reasons for doing so, of course, but that doesn’t change the fact that Microsoft is contributing to open source in more ways than most people are aware of.

Read more

What do Android, Visio, Flash, Hotmail, Google Analytics and Powerpoint all have in common? Can you guess?

The answer is: None of them were created by the companies who now own them. They were acquisitions.

These products have continued to develop at their new homes, but the seed of innovation that sparked an actual, new product came from the outside. The key word here is innovation.

Read more

We all know Google is huge and their wide range of services are bound to have a fair share of competitors, but you may be surprised just how wide-ranging Google considers its competition to be.

Here below we have included a quote from Google’s latest SEC filing with some very interesting information about what Google has to say about its competition.

Read more

Big sites and services like Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter and many others rely heavily on open source software to run their operations. Happily, this isn’t a one-way street. They are also giving back to the open source community, not just by contributing to existing projects, but sometimes by open sourcing their own internal projects, giving back something completely new.

And what these popular sites can contribute is often quite valuable. Since they tend to be very large, they run big operations and have been forced to create solutions for scalability and performance problems that most other sites simply don’t have to deal with.

Read more

Think about the software you use day to day. Depending on your profession and interests, what you use will vary, but some applications tend to show up over and over again. Microsoft Word and Excel, Powerpoint, Photoshop, various web browsers like Internet Explorer and Firefox, Skype, iTunes, and so on.

When it comes to those widely used, highly established desktop applications, think about how long it’s been since they first saw the light of day. Many of them are practically ancient.

Read more