My piece published in Faking News: Consulting industry in crisis as deadly virus removes PowerPoint from computers

New Delhi. A computer virus, now named Globe.iWin.32 and having traits of a Trojan malware, is spreading fast across computers and removing Microsoft PowerPoint application from the infected systems. Not only the virus uninstalls PowerPoint, it denies all subsequent attempts to reinstall the vital software used in the management consulting companies and business schools. In fact, the virus has also shown phishing and data-corrupting traits.

“I clicked a free subscription offer link from an e-mail sent apparently by McKinsey Quarterly,” informed an independent management consultant Karthik Laxman, who is now crestfallen and clueless as not only the virus has removed PowerPoint, it has automatically and almost instantly converted all the .ppt files on the hard disk into complete gibberish.

“Earlier the client had problems understanding them, now even I can’t make the head or tail of it,” said a sobbing Karthik, double clicking his precious presentations hoping in vain to extract some useful content out of them.

Understandably, this threat has sent shock waves across the globe and has evoked sharp reactions. Mr. Prashant Gupta, Partner at McKinsey & Co., suffered a massive heart attack shortly after this news was telecast on news channels.

Mr. Danny Fart, a partner at Boston Consulting Group said, “This is seriously detrimental to our business model. We’ll go out of business in a few months if nothing is done to stop this menace.”

The Global Consultants Association (GCA) has asked all the leading anti-virus companies to develop a solution to this “grave threat”. When asked if the anti-virus companies should hire some consultants before developing virus-remover application, Mr. P.P.T. James Gasifier, President of GCA, said, “It depends.”

Further asked to elaborate, he added, “This is an acute problem. And that would mean that the airlines would go out of business thus triggering a chain reaction affecting different sectors and the entire global economy would go into a tailspin. Microsoft should come up with an addendum and concentrate on leveraging synergies across verticals for sustainable growth, investing in niche sectors like energy and should focus on reducing the carbon footprint.”

There were worried reactions in the b-school circles as well. Mr. Narindham Chaudhary, Director of IIPM (Indian Institute of PowerPoint Management) commented, “This is totally catastrophic. We had started a niche post graduate management program in PowerPoint presentation a couple of years back. The course was very well received by the industry and the first batch of 60 people received 1000+ international offers with an average salary that is more than that of the President of the United States. We also had a student exchange agreement in place with Harvard, Kellogg, Wharton and many other top b-schools of the world.”

The directors of all the 7 (and growing fast like the Globe.iWin.32 virus) Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) had an emergency meeting a few hours after this news became public. The unanimous view was that this development would seriously impact the pedagogy at the IIMs and shake the foundation of most of the courses taught in most of the b-schools.

However there was one group which was greatly excited about this news – the students at Indian b-schools. The excitement was palpable in several b-school campuses across India with students jumping with joy and celebrating. Booze parties were a common sight across the b-schools as they hoped to start a new life without PowerPoint.