Five 2018 April Fools Day story picks for enterprise buffs

April Fools Day was on Sunday this year when most diginomica people are doing the right thing and enjoying real life. Nevertheless, elsewhere, some hardy souls were busy winding up the rest of the world with plausible prank posts. Here are my top picks:

Phil Fersht – How blockchain will change the world in many more ways than you realize. It’s cataclysmic

Fersht does one of these every year and sure enough, plenty of people get sucked into the ruse. Despite Fersht’s penchant for OTT and sometimes trenchant language, the title should have been a giveaway. Apparently not. According to Phil, the post got 30 likes on LinkedIn before someone twigged. Which goes to prove one of my pet theories – likes on social media are in no way indicative of engagement by actually reading something but more likely folk’s way of trying to glom onto someone’s reputation.

Having said that, I could almost go with this:

Even President Donald Trump has confirmed the future potential of Blockchain in a recent series of tweets where he argued ‘It’s the best. The greatest. Just great. I’m so glad I came up with idea before Cambridge Analytica and Facebook. But seriously, Ivanka, is there any way we can delete some of the data on there? Yes those blocks called Stormy, delete them.’

Elon Musk – on Twitter, naturally:

Elon was found passed out against a Tesla Model 3, surrounded by “Teslaquilla” bottles, the tracks of dried tears still visible on his cheeks.

This is not a forward-looking statement, because, obviously, what’s the point?

Happy New Month! pic.twitter.com/YcouvFz6Y1

– Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 1, 2018

The fact close to 100K people liked it on Twitter tells us plenty about the man’s ‘influence.’

Thankfully, the stock markets were closed because I can certainly see some financial anal-ysts taking this seriously and recommending an immediate sell-off. More prosaically, Musk’s iconic Tesla business is a lightning rod for diametrically opposed views. Some see it as a rocket ship, others think it’s a dead duck. I’m not going to explore the two positions on this post.

With more than 25K views, SAP Mentor Paul Hardy‘s SAP opens Brewery, starts making Beer earns a Comedy Gold Star. Hitting on just about every SAP marketing message capable of derision, Hardy goes with this swipe at CEO Bill McDermott’s oft-quoted ‘Run Simple’ mantra, turning it into a beer-soaked slogan:

“SAP Beer – Run Simply to the lavatory to be sick!”

My personal favorite and a swipe at SAP’s embarrassing indirect licensing problems:

P.S. Make sure you do not burp after drinking a can of SAP Beer, as if anyone hears you burp you will be subject to a ten thousand dollar “indirect licensing fee” per listener.

I’m surprised someone hasn’t thought of this before given, as Hardy correctly points out, SAP runs more than 70% of the world’s beer production. That would be all the beer I don’t drink since I prefer micro-brews.

My personal endnote – 25K views on the SAP Community website over a holiday weekend? I wonder what will happen when SAP Germany gets back to work?

Unit4 caught a lot of folks out with: Today we announced a truly unique AI-powered ‘translator’ to prevent cultural misunderstandings in business. This was a very clever prank post because it draws on well-known misinterpretations that occur in language as used in different countries.

It is programmed based on common interpretations of what people in one country say and what they really mean. For example, in the UK when people say, ‘That’s interesting’, it is often meant as a dismissal. So the comment, ‘That is an interesting proposal’ could well mean, ‘I think you are crazy.’ Wanda EasySpeak knows the intent of the person communicating and ensures the recipient knows that too.

You could almost believe that. Which brings to mind the problems I had with ‘ass’ and ‘butt’ in the U.S. This could be useful in many circumstances.

The killer was the brilliantly crafted video which to date has garnered more than 23K views. Including a manic looking Holger Mueller, analyst with Constellation Research (and good buddy of ours) was a masterstroke.

Vijay Vijayasankar, another good friend and buddy scored with his self-deprecating Tweet:

Oh well, my CTO gig was short lived . Next adventure – chief evangelist of IBM storage , focusing on tape storage .

– Vijay Vijayasankar (@vijayasankarv) April 1, 2018

Vijay is a regular raconteur both on Twitter and his personal blog, dishing out pearls of wisdom that sometimes have the feel of being cast before swine. This one didn’t with comedians in his network suggesting (among other things) that we should bring back punch cards. Alan Lepofsky (another Constellation analyst) came up with the (near) perfect quip.

Sounds magnetic. I hope you enjoy giving it a spin.

– Alan Lepofsky 🇨🇦 Future of Work (@alanlepo) April 1, 2018

And who was it exactly who said that enterprise software is boring? Oh yeah, all those consumer tech folk that talk about pivoting and failing fast while burning through somebody else’s money.

Until next year…

Image credit – via 123greetingmessages Disclosure – SAP and Unit4 are diginomica premier partners at the time of writing