If you’ve ever spent time in a server room or racks room, you’ll know it’s an cold place full of grey boxes, black boxes and wires. Not the kind of place you expect to see a product that makes people want to talk (aka word of mouth advertising, aka free publicity).

Then along came Google which invented its own box (the Google Search Appliance) for businesses to use in their buildings, to search their intranets, internal company documents, that sort of thing.

Google couldn’t make their box a different shape, because it had to fit in racks with all the other boxes. So it made it bright yellow. And whacked a massive logo on the side.

Then it ran a competition to see how “findable” the box is in the server room. That helped to promote the concept, because the box is there to help businesses find things more easily.

I know Google has a million clever people working for it, but that’s really smart.