“ We were busy arranging a graphic design of the box, putting easter egg jokes in the tech specs on the side, leveraging corporate partnerships, and prepping to make a run of several hundred boxes through one of Microsoft’s production printing systems. This was not only kind of expensive, but a commitment, a step that would in effect put an official stamp from Microsoft on the plan.”

I suspect that this is the reason the “PR flacks” didn’t just dismiss this as a joke gone wrong, but went beyond to insist (lie) that it was done by outsiders.