Yes, I know it's April 2, but bear with me. I
feel like I'm like most people when I say I was never
a huge fan of April Fool's Day. I lacked the
creative—and dastardly—instincts to inflict
embarrassment on my fellow sufferers. I
wholeheartedly believe my energies are better spent
elsewhere. Such as trying to not to be the butt of a
joke. Again.
So that's what makes corporate shenanigans that much
more interesting. When a company plays a joke, it
represents the effort of a whole team of people
working hard to inflict embarrassment on fellow
sufferers. So it should be a doozy, right?
Well, see, playing a joke requires a certain carefree
wackiness that most corporate entities-focused as
they are on productivity, strategy, and steadfast
organization-have difficulty embracing. Usually the
results are mild, but occasionally there's a spicy
zinger or two. One classic I do remember: in 1996
Taco Bell said it bought the Liberty Bell and named
it the Taco Liberty Bell. I like to think most people
picked up on that right away. Right. In what could be
the top joke of all time, a good portion of England's
populace was taken in by a 1957 BBC news report
claiming that Swiss farmers had enjoyed a
bumper crop of spaghetti that year. Nicely
done.
In yesterday's R&D Daily you may have seen the
link to "Google launches Virgle," and soon (I hope) deduced
that what you saw was a somewhat elaborate April
Fool's Day hoax. As such pranks go, "Virgle" was less
of a joke than a farcical appetizer for the mind.
Some lucky Google employees were charged with cooking
up "factoids" mixed with half-serious colonization
strategies to serve up a vision of our future on
Mars. Some liked it. Some didn't. And some were duped entirely. In what had
to be the most entertaining scene at this year's CTIA
Wireless 2008 Show, which happened to coincide with
April 1, an audience took Richard Branson's speech
about Virgle perfectly seriously. By the end of his
talk, Branson had 30 people up on stage ready to
become Martian guinea pigs. And there it was, Virgle
officially became a quality April Fool's
hoax.
The thing is, it's not really a hoax. It might not be
called Virgle, and we might suffer a few setbacks to get there,
but we're going to Mars someday. If you got hooked at
all by the prank, I'm sure you saw the error
page, which admits to the joke, finishing up:
"Virgle isn't real. Yet."
