Key funny:

They set out to provide Pepsi in a red can. They ended up giving us so much more. Twenty-five years ago Friday, the product and brand management masterminds at Coca-Cola introduced New Coke — a cola-formula-changing misstep so profound, so epochal, so mind-numbingly misguided that it quickly transcended the realm of mere marketing blunder and became something else entirely: a lasting, pitch-perfect, near-Shakespearean metaphor for colossal, foolhardy failure poured from a 12-ounce can of corporate hubris, sipped through a straw of not leaving well enough alone.

For that, I’m so very, very grateful.

Twenty-five years!

There are articles (and books) out there that’ll point out every nuanced flaw in completely replacing one’s flagship brand, so I won’t get into that here. Everything written about the New Coke brand either begins or ends with, “How could a major corporation be so dumb?”

I don’t know the answer to that, but I will ask one question, though. When exactly did Coke switch from sugar to the much less expensive high fructose corn syrup?

Think about it.