Origami Project

I love viral marketing - check out <www.origamiproject.com>. If you do enough web searches you'll find that the path leads back to Microsoft. I've viewed this a few times and each time I do I think "wow, this is cool." However, then I remember this is the same company that does the dinosaur heads to sell Office. Hmm... there is some serious disconnect here. How can we do something so cool and so pathetic at the same time?

Here's my guess. The origami campaign wasn't tested with users. The firm who developed it showed it to the MS team and the response was "YES!". While I bet the "D-head" stuff was tested with a bunch of audiences and went through a huge approval process. It just goes to show you that you can't always deliver a winner. It also says that sometimes you need to go with your gut - test audiences many times will tell you what they think you want to hear. Why they thought we wanted to "D-head" I'll never know.

Update (2/27): Here's some more information: <seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/260983_msftdevice27.html>