On September 2nd, Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich was on top of every interviewer’s wish list. In 24 hours, he spilled the beans in magazines, newspapers, newscasts and blogs all over the world. Saying things like:

“We’re ten days from release. I mean, from here, we’re golden. If this thing leaks all over the world today or tomorrow, happy days. Happy days. Trust me” to British Kerrang, and:

“By 2008 standards, that’s a victory. If you’d told me six months ago that our record wouldn’t leak until 10 days out, I would have signed up for that” to USA Today.

Sparking these quotes was Metallica’s expectations-society-business-logic release of their new album, set for September 12, which I wrote about in a Swedish business magazine  (I’ll get back to that in a future post).

On September 2nd, nearly two weeks prior to the release date, a French record store began selling copies of the album, which, of course, sparked the possibility for anyone, anywhere to make it downloadable. This prompted Metallica’s distributors, such as UK branch Vertigo Records, to officially release the album two days ahead of schedule, on September 10, 2008. On that day, you could even find it at the local gas station in Växjö, Sweden.

Lars Ulrich’s quote says it all -”…by 2008 standards, that’s a victory”.

Once upon a time, in a millennium far, far away, companies worried about initial sales being too slow. Today, sales cannot be slow, they can only be too fast. Everybody must be prepared to rethink and relaunch. Even new millennium icon Google:

On the very same day as Lars Ulrich tap danced through the media, September 2nd, Google launched its new web browser chrome. Which was not the original plan.

The release announcement was originally scheduled for the day after, September 3rd. However, copies of the press material were shipped early to Europe and German blogger Philipp Lenssen made a scanned copy of it available immediately after he received it on September 1. This led Google to instantly make the material (which came in toe form of a 38-page comoc book) available on Google Books and another official sites.

Release parties world-wide were immediately rescheduled a couple of days early, and on September 2nd, Chrome was released in 43 languages.