I disagree wholeheartedly. I'm pretty tired of fictional April Fool's joke. If you've got a good idea for a (harmless) prank, DO IT. Don't write up some lame webpage to make people think you did it.
> Don't write up some lame webpage to make people think you did 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.
Kind of related to the last few seconds of the news clip - Feb 14 1996 "Zoo Gorilla Gives Birth In Seattle" - I imagine visitation for the new baby would come around a month and a half after birth. https://www.spokesman.com/stories/1996/feb/14/zoo-gorilla-gi...
Had to remove the /1, but good find. That does seem to put the right timeframe -- and with confirmation they're real presenters too. It's not a matter of finding a c. 25 year old clip from the news to base a fake on, it would be finding one from about March-May 1996 (which itself would be amazing to have for no reason), and then replace it.
I'm leaning more to "this is real", but it's astounding there's no reference to it before yesterday.
It's true that going to the trouble of costumes and video editing is at least some effort. However yesterday had more than its fair share of very low effort Photoshops and year after year, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
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.
The effort/motivation ratio makes far more sense for the 1996 prank than for the 2021 one. The 1996 one works out: a group of co-workers, at a company with a divisive reputation but desperately longing for being considered cool, a year after the Windows 95 release campaign made shrink-wrapped cardboard boxes the centerpiece of attention. And 1996: from Microsoft Word Art to pirated copies of Quark Express, losing themselves to print preparation screen time was just something people did, in the 90ies.
The hypothetical 2021 prank? Why Microsoft? Why Java? Why the completely forgotten medium of cardboard boxes?