Thursday, February 13, 1997

News you're still unlikely to read

By DAN GILLMOR

Knight-Ridder Newspapers

SAN JOSE, Calif. - Uh, I was kidding.

Last week in this space, I quoted an unnamed Microsoft Corp. executive admitting to illegal business practices.

In the same column, a spokesman for two software-industry trade groups was quoted as admitting that the organizations might be making wildly inflated guesses about how much software is being illegally copied.

And I had a spokesman for the PC industry announcing the end of the sleazy practice of showing video monitors in computer systems advertisements, but then (in small print) saying the monitor isn't included.

Repeat: I WAS KIDDING.

I'm a little surprised that I need to say this. Here's how the column began: "News stories we're unlikely to read:"

And the quotes I invented were so completely over the top - such as: "We'll also raise prices where our monopoly power allows us to get away with it" - that I assumed even the most humor-impaired reader would at least understand that IT WAS A JOKE.

Apparently not.

On Monday, after the column appeared in the newspaper and was sent out by our wire service, I got a call from an earnest woman at the Business Software Alliance. She was astounded, she said, by the quotes attributed to the spokesman for her organization and the Software Publishers Association. She wanted me to know that no one there could possibly have told me that the software industry was making up its piracy estimates, as my column suggested.

I said, "It was a joke."

There was a pause on the other end of the line.

"Oh," she said.

It turned out that someone had sent her an e-mail containing the offending quotes, but without the column's introductory line. Once she understood that IT WAS A JOKE, she relaxed.

So, during a similar phone call later that day, did a prominent public-relations executive who works for Microsoft. A batch of e-mail apparently careened around Microsoft and its PR firm Monday as various executives denied having told me things that might well, if accurately rendered, have landed them in court.

The cosmic meaning of all this is not that some people will take seriously even the most obvious satire, or that Microsoft, more than any other company I can name, needs a humor implant (though THAT IS NOT A JOKE). Rather, it's a note of caution, a reminder that indiscriminate cutting-and-pasting and out-of-context quotes can lead people astray. (My own business is too often guilty of the latter violation.)

The Internet being what it is, the column has already begun to morph into a minor-league bit of Urban Legend. On an Internet newsgroup devoted to the Java programming language, someone with the cyber-pen name of "Leapin Larry" - THIS IS NOT A JOKE - posted excerpts of my column as evidence that anyone who loves technology should hate Microsoft. Oh, great.

Actually, the worst part is that Bill Gates interrupted his speech to world leaders in Switzerland to call and offer me $10 million (plus stock options) to stop writing this column and become the editor of the column he writes for the New York Times syndicate. I told my boss and asked for a raise, but for some reason he didn't believe me.