Fakes, Nonsense, and a Crying CEO

What a heartwarming, inspirational story.

"During the press conference to announce NOKIA being acquired by Microsoft, Nokia CEO ended his speech saying this “we didn’t do anything wrong, but somehow, we lost”. Upon saying that, all his management team, himself included, teared sadly."

The author then proceeds to point out that stopping to improve may kill your business.

Rahul Gupta's post has collected 45,300 likes, 4,500 comments, and 26,500 shares.

And it is totally made-up nonsense.

Here is the video of the press conference. Nobody cried. Nobody broke down after admitting defeat. Of course not. If that had happened, we would all have a clear memory of it from the news of that day since it would have been headline news. You'll also notice that the CEO, Stephen Elop, has hair on his head, unlike whoever is shown in the original post's headline picture (might be Ballmer, ironically)

LinkedIn is full of random bullshit of this sort, this just happens to be a piece where it ought to be entirely obvious to anyone who has been watching the IT industry from any distance over the past several years.

Yes, the conclusion "if you rest on your laurels, your company will be overtaken and die" does sound right in the Nokia/Windows smartphone story context. But do we need made-up stories to make that point?

The fake news problem exists in social media not just because some clowns create these stories, but because they are shared broadly by tens of thousands of professionals without a moment of thought spent on whether the story might be plausible.

You don't get to complain about the "post-factual world" if you don't fight its rise.