Beyond Everywhere: How Wi-Fi Became the World’s Most Beloved Technology by Greg Ennis

Author:Greg Ennis [Ennis, Greg]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Post Hill Press
Published: 2023-04-20T09:24:34+00:00

CHAPTER 22

Launching in a Hurricane

We have ignition, we have liftoff—Wi-Fi is unveiled to the world

We had unfortunately scheduled our Wi-Fi launch event during hurricane season. Northern Georgia itself wasn’t hit by Hurricane Floyd, but as it approached the Florida and Carolina coastlines, over 2.5 million people had evacuated—one of the largest evacuations in US history—and it seemed like they were all trying to escape to Atlanta.

Some of these evacuees had made it to our hotel, and that morning the hotel’s breakfast café was packed with exhausted parents and their anxious pajama-clad toddlers. You got the sense that their drive was long and dark and slow, passing gas stations out of gas and full motels. Somehow, these bedraggled families had managed to find vacancies in this big conference center hotel in the middle of the night.

All eyes were on the noisy TV across from the waffle station, with scenes of the winds battering against boarded-up storefronts. The breakfast conversations were certainly unique: “I like to nail two-by-six boards mounted vertically over the east-facing windows,” said one father to another. “Better than plywood, that’s my experience.” I was asked if I had come from Savannah and got a surprised look when I said California—and then, of course, came the usual, “How do you like them earthquakes?” The waitresses were trying their best to avoid the boys scooting their toy cars along the tile floor.

But although Floyd caused significant damage in the Bahamas, it ended up just skirting the US coast, and there was a palpable sense of relief as we all watched the news that morning. It looked like it would be possible for us to focus on our task and do our final prep for the event. On that morning of September 15, 1999, we were finally ready to launch Wi-Fi to the world.

Sometimes I think that good marketeers just have a different kind of brain, and John Ferrari was no exception. At breakfast, he asked for more coffee and then looked over at me. “We really missed an opportunity. We should have printed up a bunch of Wi-Fi logo stick-on decals and bribed the airport baggage handlers to slap them on every piece of luggage that came in last night.”

I was confused. “Yeah, but we’re not unveiling the name until later today. No one would know what those decals mean.”

“But that’s exactly the point, Greg. It would have made everyone wonder what’s going on, until they read about it the next day. That’s just good guerilla marketing.”

I still don’t know if he was joking. But as we were working that day to finalize our slides, we came up with another joke—or at least at the time we thought it was joke. Somebody grabbed a satellite color image of Hurricane Floyd, and we worked it into the presentation as our final edit. It’s a gorgeous image, showing the entire eastern half of North America, a deep blue Atlantic, the blackness of space above the curve of the earth, with massive white swirling bands of storm stretching from Florida to New England.

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