By Bio-IT World staff
April 1, 2009 | Showing a refreshing sense of humour, the Danish informatics company CLC bio played a traditional April Fool prank on the bio-IT/life sciences community by sending out a curious press release today, April 1st.
Entitled “Licenses out of stock at CLC bio,” the email release said that “Due to a general increase in sales and especially overwhelming sales of CLC Genomics Workbench for analyzing and visualizing Next Generation Sequencing data, CLC bio must regrettably announce that new customers can't get their licenses without delay.”
CLC bio vice president Jan Lomholdt was then quoted: “Originally we chose a Russian license supplier -- Глупая Фабрика (St. Petersburg) -- because the Cyrillic alphabet would ensure an extra level of encryption, and thereby be harder to bypass by people with sinister intentions. Things have been working smoothly up to this date, with an adequate number of licenses to meet demands. If we had anticipated this situation, we would of course have increased our inventory. It's an unfortunate situation, but our Russian license supplier is working around the clock right now in order to have a new batch of licenses ready to be flown to Aarhus -- hopefully within this week.”
The statement concluded with an apology for the inconvenience caused and an offer of an extra 5% discount until the situation is remedied.
The release appears to have caught at least one reputable life science web news service out.