Competitive Intelligence

April Fools Plague the Business World

Modern April Fools' Day pranks have come a long way since their humble beginnings with French school children.

History says the Roman Empire set the beginning of the year on April 1. In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII ordered a new calendar (the Gregorian Calendar) to replace the old, but it wasn't until 1752 that the rest of Europe adopted the calendar. Those who still celebrated the beginning of the year on April 1 were "fools".

Under the new calendar, the French came to call April 1 Poisson d'Avril or "April Fish". To play a prank, school children would put a picture of a fish on their classmate's backs and scream "April Fish!"

Since then, Americans have adopted the practice, coming up with their own April Fools' pranks. April Fools' pranks have taken on a new dimension over the years with the invention of the Internet. Now not only close friends can be pranked, but the whole world can be fooled.

In 1994 an April Fools' prank caused an uproar on-line in an article entitled "Microsoft To Buy Catholic Church". The e-mail, in the format of a newspaper article, announced Bill Gates was trading Microsoft shares for the Vatican.

And, now even PR firms are getting into the act by telling us who was most foolish. For the second consecutive year, Michael Jackson has been named the country's most foolish individual in an April Fools' Day survey conducted by a New York public relations consultant. Janet finished second.

Of the 1,016 adults polled last month, 77 percent thought Michael had done something foolish in the past year. They were not asked to specify what they thought that foolish thing was.

We all know the reason for Janet's lofty position, though it must be pointed out that her breast-baring got her into the No. 2 spot by just one vote over Martha Stewart. Also in the top 10 of consultant Jeff Barge's fifth annual poll were Britney Spears, Rush Limbaugh, Paris Hilton and Rosie O'Donnell.

But, more interesting was an article in the Houston Chronicle summing up Google's Gmail launch and the widespread belief the announcement might've been a hoax:

It's not like Internet search service Google can't laugh at itself, but when an April Fools' joke got out of hand today, a real business plan was rumored to be a Web hoax -- and that was no laughing matter.

Privately held Google Inc. had Web message boards buzzing today over whether a new e-mail product, announced on Wednesday and meant to challenge Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp , was actually an April Fools' joke.

Google's announcement was questioned because of the U.S. No. 1 search service's unconventional sub-heading on a press release and because it also posted a fictional job listing seeking engineers for a "Google Copernicus Hosting Environment and Experiment in Search Engineering (GCHEESE)" lunar outpost.

Google's free e-mail service called Gmail, which will offer significantly more storage than Yahoo or MSN, "is not a hoax," said Jonathan Rosenberg, Google's vice president of products.

Google's unconventional March 31 press release announcing Gmail helped set Internet message boards alight because the sub-heading read: "Search is Number Two Online Activity -- Email is Number One: 'Heck, Yeah,' Say Google Founders."

"It is April Fools' Day. We were having fun with this announcement. We are very serious about Gmail," Rosenberg said in an interview.

Still, the Web was buzzing with speculation.

"It's going to go down in history as one of the biggest pranks ever pulled," wrote one message poster at Slashdot.org, which bills itself as a news provider for nerds.

That view was countered by others who noted the relatively low cost of storage and Google's registration of Gmail.com.

"The real joke was an advertisement for a job opening in 2007 at their lunar facility," another Slashdot poster wrote.

That recruiting ad - which can be viewed by clicking on the Google.com link "Want a job that's out of this world?" - details the benefits of working at Google's "Googlunaplex" location on the moon.

"The notion that we're actually opening a lunar office is consistent with the spirit of April Fool's Day, and, yes, it is a joke," Rosenberg said of the ad, posted around midnight Greenwich Mean Time today.

In fact, Google's informational site about Gmail, at www.gmail.com, was up and running Thursday during a test period with a small group of users.

According to Whois.net, an online service for researching domain name registration, Gmail.com does belong to Google.

Financial news Web site, the Motley Fool, was the one that stung me, when I read the headline on Yahoo! Finance this morning - "NYSE's Morning Mishap":

Ringing the bell at the opening of the New York Stock Exchange has been a Wall Street tradition for more than 80 years. CEOs, U.S. presidents, celebrities, and foreign dignitaries have all participated in this time-honored ceremony. Except this past Wednesday morning, it wasn't the opening bell that was heard. It was the opening belch.

- Arik