This year, Infosys plans to gift $1 million, a Toshiba
notebook, and a foreign trip to all its employees on completing 25 years of
existence!”
This snippet of inforÂmaÂtion, which was posted on
Wikipedia until a few days ago, has been doing the rounds through email
forwards. The posting, which may have been an April fool's day prank, has been
removed from Wikipedia. An Infosys spokesperson laughed away the rather generous
claim saying, “It's not true. We keep hearing rumors like this all the
time.”
Now, it looks like someone at Wikipedia also woke up to the
rumor. A search for Infosys on Wikipedia now throws up this message: “As a
result of recent vandaÂlism, editing of this page by new or unregisÂtered
users is temporarily disabled. Changes can be discussed on the talk page, or you
can request unprotection.”
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on the topic of April Fool's gags, search company Google which has been
launching new products and services regularly, announced Google Romance, a
heart-warming new service for singles ready to mingle on All Fool's Day.
The company even issued a press release that said,
“Google Romance is a new product that offers users both a psychographic
matchmaking service and all-expenÂses-paid dates for couÂples who agree to
experience contextually relevant advertising throughout the course of their
evening.”
The new service even had an appropriate tagline that said,
“When you think about it, love is just another search problem.” The beta
release is still available at http://www.google.com/romance/.
Unsuspecting, love-hungry users realized the hoax when they tried to post their
profile.
Google had a hearty laugh over the hoax and said,
“Romance Not Found!”
OpenOffice had a shocker of an announcement on April 1,
2006. It claimed that Bill Gates had bought OpenÂOffice in a deal worth
billions of dollars. The reason for Gates' decision, “He was sick and tired
of open-source eating away his profits, and so the world's richest man decided
to put an end to the nuisance and simply buy OpenÂOffice.org.” Who says
techies lack a sense of humor?
Priya Padmanabhan Bangalore, April 6