Is "Marketingspeak" Killing Technology?

An anonymous reader writes "In this essay titled, inevitably, "SUNset?" an analogy is drawn between the car industry in Detroit, which failed in the 70s because the execs looked out their windows and saw nothing but American cars and so missed completely the threat from Japanese companies, and Sun Microsystems. "Sun is going to fail in this decade if it does nothing but send out surveys to customers asking them to validate marketing phrases of Sun's creation," says the author. He adds: "If you are someone who never gets tired of hearing 'proven,' 'best-of-breed,' 'cost-effective,' or 'taking the surprise out of business solutions,' then contact Sun and demand as much of their current marketing material as they can muster." But it isn't just Sun, surely. This is a failing of technology marketeers in general. Hmm, doubtless we can all come up with our own examples far equally awful as these from Sun. Who can come up with worse?"

Comments

"Sun is going to fail in this decade..."

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

"Sun is going to fail in this decade..."

Isn't Sun already irrelevant? I mean, unless you are working for the goverment (and are also stuck with Unisys, TI, etc.), who the hell installs a NEW Sun system these days?

Re:I followed the "Awful" examples link

[Lord_Dweomer]

You sir, are a jackass who has SERIOUSLY misconceived notions about an industry he knows absolutely nothing about.

Drop the elitist techy crap for a second and realize that different people have different skill sets. Marketing people know a HELL of a lot more about dealing with people than you apparently do. And you act as if the ability of a marketer to put their jargon into plain english to make it more easy to understand is a bad thing. I should be asking you why people don't comment their code enough.

But all of my points are not really important because they're falling on the deaf ears of someone who does not understand that technically PR is a facet of marketing, and that PR has been found to have a MASSIVELY larger impact on sales figures than traditional advertising has as of late. I wonder, what is scarier, that you think that secretaries could handle the PR or marketing for a company, or that those "secretaries" that actually do handle the marketing and PR have more impact on the companies bottom line than you ever would and you're not secure enough about your job to be able to just accept it and realize that different people are good at different things.

And for those about to mod me as troll or flamebait, try rereading the parent I'm responding to, and then realize that I'm not trolling or flaming him, I'm correcting the troll..err..parent.