Conspiracy Theories

I have worked at several publicly traded companies in the course of my career.  At those companies, I was usually motivated to have at least some interest in what was happening to the stock price.  Monitoring the stock quote online would often bring me into incidental contact with the online forums discussing the company and its stock.  It was there that I saw first hand the wonderful wackiness of conspiracy theories.

People would weave elaborate speculations about how we clearly had our next three generations of products already developed, and we were carefully regulating our product introductions to manipulate the price of the stock, and to generate the best possible return for the senior management shareholders.  When we did something bone-headed, it was some nefarious scheme to sew confusion in the market place, in anticipations of our next countering parry.  And when some bit of news broke our way, it was because our behind-the-scenes machinations had come to fruition, and the genius of our master plan was slowly becoming evident.

The explanation that nobody was particularly interested in talking about was that we were working as fast as we could to release cool products as soon as possible so that we'd make enough money to be doing the same things this time next year.  Our "mistakes" were actually the result of... mistakes.  Our lucky breaks were the normal statistical distribution of events.  Did we know what we planned on releasing in our next generation of products?  Sort of.  But we also knew that those plans would be radically modified, often until the last possible moment before shipping product, and many products that we got far into development on would never see the light of day.

It was, for me, a wonderful illustration of the reality of most conspiracy theories.  They can sound plausible when you're on the outside, but when you're on the inside, you understand that there is nowhere near that degree of control being exercised by anyone.  But, you say, maybe I was just an unknowing pawn in the carefully structured plans of my corporate puppet masters.  Maybe.  But unless they had completely separate development teams, working in different buildings, with different design repositories (which they didn't), I had pretty good visibility, even as a minion, into everything going on in engineering.

I tend to suspect that most other conspiracy theories are, like those I was speculated to be a part of, are just smoke and mirrors and the human ability to see patterns in chaos.  The world is random and messy and hard to predict when you're trying to, and there usually isn't a secret deeper level of manipulation going on below the surface.  Sometimes there may be, but not nearly as often as a lot of people seem determined to believe.

(... Or maybe that's exactly what they WANT you to believe. :)