iLoo

~ the obit ~

Microsoft announced an internet toilet and then said the announcement had been a joke. The following day it withdrew that and said the joke had been a real project which it had already shut down. All three statements went out inside two weeks in May 2003, and the second one is the only one that was not true.

The announcement came from MSN UK on 30 April 2003 and described a portable toilet with a wireless broadband connection, a height-adjustable plasma screen, a waterproof keyboard and a six-channel sound system. The toilet paper was to be printed with web addresses. It was pitched as part of a series of MSN.co.uk projects about how people were using the web, and the deployment plan was the British summer festival circuit, where the queue for the portable toilet is a fixed feature of the weekend.

The press did what the press was going to do with that. On 12 May, Microsoft in the United States told reporters that the iLoo had been a hoax by its British division, described it as an April Fool's joke and apologized. The following day it took that statement back. A spokesperson confirmed the iLoo had been a legitimate demonstration project and that the hoax explanation was wrong. It had been canceled by executives in Redmond who decided it did not fit what MSN was trying to be.

You cannot have missed the iLoo, because there was never anything to miss. I was at university in Turkey in 2003 and the story reached me the way it reached everybody, as a wire item that got a laugh at the end of a news bulletin and then stopped. That is the only relationship any person on earth has with this product. It is on this site because it is the rare thing with a birth date, a death date, a named cause of death and a full specification sheet, and no physical existence at any point.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the denial ~

The toilet is the joke and the denial is the actual story. A company was embarrassed enough by its own marketing department to invent an explanation that made the situation worse, and then had to correct the invention inside twenty-four hours, which meant admitting both that the product had been real and that the previous day's statement had not been.

The cover story did not even survive a calendar check. The announcement went out on 30 April, so calling it an April Fool's joke required the joke to have been published a month late by a corporate press office. Every reporter who had the original release could see that. The retraction was not generosity, it was the only available move once somebody counted the days.

~ what it was for ~

2003 is the year broadband stopped being a thing you noticed and started being a thing marketing departments wanted to put somewhere surprising. MSN UK was competing for attention against a portal business it was losing, and a wireless connection in an unlikely box was cheap coverage. It worked, in the sense that a product which was never manufactured is still being written about twenty-three years later.

There was even a prior claim on it. Andrew Cubitt had built a similar prototype under a similar name for a university thesis in 2001 and said publicly that Microsoft had taken the idea. Nothing came of it legally. The concept arrived anyway, about a decade later, in the form of a phone that already does all of this and does not require a plasma screen bolted to a wall of molded plastic in a field.

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