April First came and went with its set of jokes and hoaxes. Thankfully, I didn’t succumb to any, but for a few from our very own Google! Yeah right, Google too released its set of April Fool Hoaxes very promptly, this year! If you didn’t know, Google has a history of April Fool hoaxes in the past including very inventive stuff like Google Gulp (A fictitious energy drink) to Google TiSP (a toilet-linked broadband service!)

So, the very inventive jokes by Google this time are:

1. CADIE or “Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity” was the first in the long list of gags. Users of Google books and GMail found this queer announcement on March 31st. That day, the Google homepage said this:
   

   “For several years now a small research group has been working on some challenging problems in the areas of neural networking, natural language and autonomous problem-solving. Last fall this group achieved a significant breakthrough: a powerful new technique for solving reinforcement learning problems, resulting in the first functional global-scale neuro-evolutionary learning cluster.”

   LOL, ain’t it? Here’s the link to CADIE. And guess what, CADIE even has an official blog, on which page, Google shows an error. Here’s an image which shows how the blog looked like.

2. Almost all other hoaxes, including this one on YouTube, were based on CADIE. YouTube had a very hilarious ‘new viewing experience’ page, which actually inverted videos!! Take a look at this to see a featured video by the user ‘CADIE’.
3. GMail gets a new ‘autopilot’ option‘ with which, one could ‘adjust tone, typo propensity, and preferred punctuation from the Autopilot tab under Settings.’ It even has a ‘relationship ender’ which sends messages like ‘Terminate relationship’ as response to relationship related messages – says the FAQ page
4. GBall powered by CADIE comes next in the line. Exclusively for users from Australia, is said to be a ball for the Australia Football league in prototype. Whoa! And its technically engineered too!!
   
5. Even  Google analytics wasn’t spared. Here’s an analytics report of CADIE’s activities!!
6. There was even a 3D edition of Google chrome – running with the power of CADIE. Here’s how it looks!
   
7. Then came Google’s brain search, reminiscent of the old MentalPlex hoax. Same logic, but works only with mobile phones. You have to hold your mobile phone to your brain so as to ‘search the brain’. And you’re not supposed to search others without permission!! Try it… it’s damn funny! This is a sample result!!
8. Then there was Picasa with auto red eye… LMAO!!

A friend of mine – a budding entrepreneur, recently mailed me his frank assessment of  today’s IT sector. He’s been working with the who’s who in the industry for over a year now. He’s read the diverse comments on my Infosys and thought he’d have his opinion here. This is what he has to say:

1) None of the IT companies are out there to do social service. They do it to make money and have every right to do so. They may ask the employees to work 12-14 hours a day, if situation demands – and they have every right to do that. Why else should they hire a production engineering student and put him in front of a computer “coding”? Makes sense?

2) Ramalinga Raju should definitely be punished for what he did. However, why is it that people pick on only private companies? How many of them realize that there is “corruption” on a larger scale in our government? Why is it that no one else is held responsible. Mr. Ramalinga raju could have very well hidden facts the way he did all this while. And when he did apologise and accept his mistake – the Sensex crashed and people started blaming him! How many politicians have done more heinous acts? Why is it that none of them have the balls to come out in public?

3) Indian IT industry survives on outsourcing. We have so many “thriving” companies only because the cost of living here is lower and hence we can provide services at a cheaper rate. And when the main clients in US are affected by the global meltdown, how can you expect the companies to spend the same way it used to?

Having heard that from the horse’s mouth, I feel the guy has a point. What do you have to say? Shout it out!