Apple is famous for its well-designed hardware and software. Much of their success is due to innovative products combined with smart marketing. They have always had their own way of doing things.

If you’re an Apple fan you have probably seen that famous yellow post-it note. We’re of course talking about the “maintenance” page that Apple puts up at Apple Store every time they are about to release something new.

And this is where the magic happens. It’s like one of those Pavlovian conditioned reflexes: When Apple Store is taken down, the web start to buzz. Will they release new products? What will they release? When will Apple Store be back up?

They have managed to take something most people consider a big negative, i.e. downtime, and transformed it into something positive. Apple Store downtime is a delimiter, an indication of something new to come. It has become an automatic buzz creator.

If Apple releases a new product, it will of course be talked about anyway, but with this additional marketing trick they have added another layer of anticipation, another thing to talk about and set off speculation.

This has been going on for years. Apple has managed to create a massive PR machine at the cost of closing their online sales for a couple of hours, and they have done it so consistently that they have trained Apple users and journalists alike to react this way. They could basically just take down Apple Store and the word would spread automatically that something is about to happen.

Who else would get this huge, positive reaction by taking down their online store for a few hours?

The last example was last Tuesday, January15, when Apple released Macbook Air. During this launch Apple Store was down (for “maintenance”) between 15:20-19:40 CET and then again 20:05-20:20 CET, a total of 4 hours and 35 minutes according to Pingdom monitoring.

Any doubts that this is creating buzz?

• A search for ”apple store down” on Google gives 21,000 results.
• A search for ”apple store down” on Technorati in blogs with a lot of authority gives 43,238 results.
• And this is a typical reaction.

It seems pretty clear that this is an intentional, and quite ingenious, marketing stunt from Apple. No other online store takes down their site on purpose to update with new products. Even the most simple e-commerce system doesn’t need that.

You really have to love them for pulling this off. Downtime is hated everywhere, but somehow everyone cheers when Apple Store goes down. Now that’s an accomplishment.

Google’s App Engine suffered from increased data access latency and errors yesterday, including problems serving applications. According to TechCrunch, the problems lasted for approximately six hours.

From the App Engine status page:

On July 2nd, all applications experienced increased error rate and latency with read and write Datastore and memcache operations, as well as some serving errors. Datastore access and serving have been fully restored as of 12:25 PM PDT.

What happened yesterday exposed a couple of interesting weaknesses for App Engine.

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We have exciting news to share. As you may have noticed, we made some changes to the Pingdom website yesterday, and the main thing we added was a new account type that many of you are going to love: Pingdom Free.

Now, for the first time ever, you can use Pingdom for free. We’re not talking about a free trial, but a completely free account that you can use for as long as you like, no strings attached.

In other words, you are getting a professional uptime monitoring service for free. With the Pingdom service, you’ll be the first to know when your site goes down.

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If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you’ll know that we love everything geeky, and we have often put together themed galleries that appeal to tech geeks like ourselves.

Here is a collection of some of the geekiest galleries that have come and gone on this blog.

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Wordpress.com, the popular blogging service from Automattic, has some interesting growth statistics posted on its website. Among other things, there is a graph showing how many new blogs are created on the service each day.

Based on the graphs that Automattic provides us with, it’s actually not that difficult to estimate how much Wordpress.com will grow in 2009. Which, of course, was a temptation we couldn’t resist!

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Operating systems on supercomputers used to be custom-made affairs, but this has changed. These days, Linux has become a popular choice for supercomputers. But how popular? You may be surprised.

Top500.org maintains a list of the fastest supercomputers in the world. A new list was published yesterday (it happens twice a year), so we took the opportunity to go through the list and find out what OS the top 20 supercomputers are using.

It took some work, but the results are interesting.

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