Off the AP wire:
Euphemism and allegory have always been common in business – where few get fired, but plenty get “downsized” – but some say the tongue-twisting technology industry has gone too far. “The marketing people are so bad at hyping their products that, with all my experience, I’ll have to read and reread and reread just to figure out what this thing does,” says Freedman, founder of The Computer Language Company Inc. in Point Pleasant, Pa. Anyone who’s worked in the technology industry has their list of pet peeves, and “solution” is commonly a headliner.
I think the tech marketing folk took the PR/marketing folk too seriously. Instead of coming up with what those solutions are, IT companies are happy to say we provide solutions. So then when the marketing doesn’t work they can say – well you said marketing solutions and that’s what we did. Often when I’m camped out on CNN I watch the tech commercials for software companies like Oracle and Microsoft or IBM and wonder just what the hell business-on-demand means. I think it means bullocks. I want to yell but what does it do?
I hate the term robust. It drives me batty. I think it makes me crazy because I worked in a company where people mis-pronounced it as robusk and I almost jumped across the conference table each time, assailing the offender: It’s robuST! -UST! ST! Say it with me – uhhhST! uhhhST! Everything piece of software should be robust – it’s implied! Same with scalable and enterprise – that just means: We think it can handle over a hundred concurrent users but we need a client to pay us to do the testing for it. And business on-demand means we’ll kludge together something at the last minute off some open-source software that’s half-baked and then pat ourselves on the back for supporting open-source solutions.
The worst ever was the company I worked for where they had a phase in IT management called Solutioning. The first time I heard it I thought – surely they meant to say Solving. But no, it’s Solutioning. I wondered if the employees that did the solutioning were called Solutioners (which sounds like a Stephen King novel). Or Solutionizers. And they’re busy Solutionasizing at the Solutionization Station.
Other offenders: work smarter. No, really, I want to work dumber.
Full article: Tech Marketing Words Getting Scrutiny
Whoo! I need to eat breakfast before I start blogging in the morning. I’m Cranky McCrankypants.
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