Every year I tell myself I'm not going to fall for any of it, and every year I lose about forty minutes of my morning to it anyway. Today it was Google Maps.
Somewhere around 10am I opened Maps to look up a lunch spot near the office and there was a new button sitting in the bottom corner, "Pokémon Challenge." Tap it and the whole map fills with little Pokémon sprites hiding in parks and parking lots, and you're supposed to go "catch" all 150 and become a Pokémon Master, complete with a fake job posting for a "Pokémon Master" position at Google afterward. I want to be annoyed by this. I really do. I have a whole rant queued up about how April Fools' Day turned from something the internet did to something marketing departments do at you now, on a schedule, with a creative brief. But I spent twenty-five minutes clicking around Ueno and couldn't find the last three, and that's a little bit embarrassing to admit on a blog with my name attached to it.
YouTube did their version too, a video insisting the site was shutting down after eight years so they could review every single video ever uploaded and pick a "winner," narrated with this straight-faced corporate seriousness that's honestly funnier than most actual jokes companies write. That's the one I'd point people to if you only have time for one. The Google Maps thing is cute but it's basically an Easter egg hunt; the YouTube bit has actual jokes in it.
Here's my complaint, and I mean this one: I don't think every company needs to do this anymore. It used to feel like three or four good gags a year from places that were actually funny, Google, Think Geek, maybe one good one from a game studio. Now it's every SaaS product's Twitter account announcing a fake feature nobody asked for, and by 11am my feed is just noise I have to filter through to find out if anything real happened. Somewhere in there today was an actual announcement from a payments company I follow, and I almost skipped it assuming it was a bit.
Speaking of things that are real and not jokes: I finally got some hands-on time with Office for iPad this week, which Microsoft put out last Thursday. It's the first big product thing Satya Nadella has stood up and shown off since taking over as CEO, and I think it's a smarter move than people are giving it credit for. You can open and read any document for free, no strings, which is the part that actually matters for an iPad app in 2014. Editing is locked behind an Office 365 subscription though — $99.99 a year for the Home Premium tier — and I get why Microsoft needs that revenue, but it does mean the app is basically a very nice viewer for most people who try it and don't already pay for Office. I still think it's better than anything Apple's own iWork apps do with a .docx file that has real formatting in it, and I've tested that specifically because I had a client send me a heavily tracked-changes Word doc last week that Pages just mangled.
Also, quietly, not getting nearly as much attention this week as it probably deserves: King, the company behind Candy Crush Saga, went public on the NYSE last Wednesday and it did not go well for them. Priced at $22.50 a share, opened below that, and closed down something like 15% on day one. Which feels like a pretty clean referendum on "is one very popular mobile game worth eight billion dollars," and Wall Street's answer was no. I don't think that's a huge surprise to anyone who's watched a hit game's numbers fall off a cliff a year after launch, but it's still a rough first trading day to have your name attached to.
Anyway. I never did find those last three Pokémon. If anyone knows where the Charizard is hiding on the west side of town, my inbox is open.