At least half a million downloads occurred in 24 hours as part of CodeWeavers’ Great American Lame Duck Presidential Challenge software giveaway. “My guess is the real number is going to be closer to three-quarters of a million” once the numbers are tallied, said Jon Parshall, COO of the St. Paul-based developer.

Parshall sounded euphoric, incredulous and exhausted in a follow-up phone call Wednesday, the day after his small company of 20 people kept its promise to give away its core product — software that allows Mac OS X and Linux systems to run Windows applications — as part of the stunt. The online community was stoked by my article that was first posted Sunday night and ended up receiving more than 76,000 page views, placing it among the Star Tribune’s top five stories of the week. Then the fire blazed out of control Monday when the news hit Digg. By the time the day of the giveaway, Tuesday, rolled around, it had become a download-ready frenzy.  An estimated 160,000 downloads happened in the first six hours of the giveaway, which started at midnight.

“Our e-mail server was destroyed,” Parshall said, and the main website had to be taken down because of the traffic. The downloads ended up being handled by a mirror server.

Parshall readily admitted that the challenge was a promotional gimmick, but the publicity was intended to come from posing the challenge over the summer, not having to fulfill it. As part of the challenge, the company presented five positive things that must occur during President Bush’s last six months in office. If any happened, such as the price of gas dropping to year-ago levels, CodeWeavers said it would give away its software free for a day. The goals were all realistic but seemed unlikely to be met. When gas dropped to $2.79 a gallon, the company was stuck.

“I would have been happy with 10-, 20-, 30,000 downloads,” Parshall said. Instead he might have as many as 750,000, which would increase the small company’s customer base by a factor of 10, he said. If even 1 percent of those people upgrade or buy a future product, he said, he would be ecstatic. The company also might get some business from new deals to consult with corporations about their computer setups, but Parshall said it will take a long time to wade through the avalanche of e-mails to see if that’s the case.

In the initial challenge, CodeWeavers had promised to keep giving away software if other goals were met. When I noted to Parshall that the price drop in milk had fulfilled another goal, he said the company had decided to end the challenge, as CEO Jeremy White explains in a follow-up video. “Some people might consider that weaselly,” Parshall said, but the company thought most people would understand the turnabout.

“We can’t afford to do this again,” Parshall said. “We also have to stay in business.”

CodeWeavers CEO Jeremy White on the giveaway:

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 30th, 2008 at 9:55 am and is filed under Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.