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

Worse?

[savagedome]

Who can come up with worse?

This thread is quickly going to be "That's nothing. This one time..."

Re:Worse?

[DrEldarion]

... at band camp?

Re:Worse?

[generic-man]

That's nothing. This one time, I saw a well-known web site use the phrase "far equally awful as these" in an article. I'm not sure what they meant by that.

Re:Worse?

[bhima]

... with a flute!

Re:Worse?

[ackthpt]

This thread is quickly going to be "That's nothing. This one time..."

One time??? One?!?!?

You cannot make this stuff up!

Re:Worse?

[MarsDefenseMinister]

I innovated a partnership paradigm with a flute!

I will reply shortly

[Timesprout]

Currently I am proactively generating a synergistic environment where I can bring to fruition a new paradigm in answering questions of this nature.

Re:I will reply shortly

[tekiegreg]

Let me translate this, as I'm a certified marketing to geek translator:

"I'm re-decorating my cubicle with some new gadgets in order to pretend to myself that a cooler looking cube will make myself more productive and capable of answering technology related questions."

Re:I will reply shortly

[roman_mir]

Yes, but that sentence actually makes sence. Here is what you should have said:

I am proactively exploiting efficient paradigms that will allow to e-enable value-added infomediaries scalable to customized models to syndicate transparent mindshare, which in its turn disintermediates turn-key functionalities in order to reinvent extensible deliverables in answering the foreamentioned questions in a synergistic environment.

Re:I will reply shortly

[Idarubicin]

...to e-enable value-added...

That's not marketing jargon; that's a stutter.

Those words mean what you think they mean

[staaarship]

"far equally awful"?

That's unpossible!

Got edge?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been reaching for the bleeding edge of technology for so long, my fingers really hurt now...

Example

[Monokeros]

See the third line of this quote:

Conveniently located in the heart of Palmyra Atoll, eProvisia LLC is the leading provider of reliable, robust, powerful and cost-efficient spam filtering solutions for world-class corporations and individual users.

Privately funded in 1993, now with customers in 40 countries* and over $67 million** in cash reserves, the company experienced a phenomenal growth and continues to aggressively pursue new frontiers in order to meet or exceed the needs of most demanding customers by providing a scalable, seamless, comprehensive offering.

Leveraging our paradigm-shifting product line with state of the art technology developed by a dedicated team of professionals, we offer a significant competitive advantage on the diversified but fragmented market of best of breed anti-spam solutions.
* - Not all currently recognized by UN. ** - Palmyra Atoll dollars.

--from earlier today.

Deja vu?

[sunderland56]

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

Uh.... didn't Sun fail last decade??

Re:Deja vu?

[hab136]

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

Uh.... didn't Sun fail last decade??

Nope, I looked outside, and The Sun(tm) is working perfectly! In fact, I used too much of The Sun(tm) over the weekend and it seems to have given me a nasty burn.

I hate The Sun(tm) now.

Re:Mature industry

[dcphoenix]

Only if we follow through by creating a whole new paradigm (sp?) in which employees are empowered to leverage their abilities and thus work smarter, not harder.

Catbert stikes again!

[sup4hleet]

This has been around for a while (since 2000 I think), but I still get a laugh out of it:

Catbert's Mission statement generator

Perfect for this thread!

Re:fuk yeah.

[logic hack]

lol, wtf? stfu noob! rofl ^_^

Re:fuk yeah.

[ackthpt]

the creation of incoherent language was the first technology. its been downhill since then.

Sounds like they need Language Solutions

Yes but....

[StressGuy]

Is it value-added?

It was useful ... once upon a time

[charleste]

As a geek, and unable to understand "business-esse" AND looking for a job in the mid to late 90's, AND (most importantly) on a dare, I used one of the "BS Generators" to fluff up my "objective" on my resume. To my shagrin - it worked! I got more pegs/emails/phone calls on that particular resume than I ever have - previous or after. I truly think the "businessey-type" people really DO believe their own BS - and the "Mission Statements".

Re: Worse

[Vicsun]

A two stories below this one, the following gem lies:

Privately funded in 1993, now with customers in 40 countries* and over $67 million** in cash reserves, the company experienced a phenomenal growth and continues to aggressively pursue new frontiers in order to meet or exceed the needs of most demanding customers by providing a scalable, seamless, comprehensive offering.
Leveraging our paradigm-shifting product line with state of the art technology developed by a dedicated team of professionals, we offer a significant competitive advantage on the diversified but fragmented market of best of breed anti-spam solutions.

Re:Mature industry

[infinite9]

I was given this by a coworker during a project being run by andersen consulting (now accenture). In my opinion, they are the masters of this kind of bullshit, the the following joke about chickens crossing the road. Appologies to the (unknown to me) author:

Deregulation of the chicken's side of the road was threatening its dominant market position. The chicken was faced with significant challenges to create and develop the competencies required for the newly competitive market. Accenture, in a partnering relationship with the client, helped the chicken by rethinking its physical distribution strategy and implementation processes. Using the Poultry Integration Model (PIM), Andersen helped the chicken use its skills, methodologies, knowledge, capital and experiences to align the chicken's people, processes and technology in support of its overall strategy within a Program Management framework.

Accenture convened a diverse cross-spectrum of road analysts and best chickens along with Accenture consultants with deep skills in the transportation industry to engage in a two-day itinerary of meetings in order to leverage their personal knowledge management, both tacit and explicit, and to enable them to synergize with each other in order to achieve the implicit goals of delivering and successfully architecting and implementing an enterprise-wide value framework across the continuum of poultry cross-median processes. The meeting was held in a park-like setting, enabling and creating an impactful environment which was strategically based, industry-focused, and built upon a consistent, clear, and unified market message and aligned with the chicken's mission, vision and core values. This was conducive towards the creation of a total business integration solution.
Accenture helped the chicken change to become more successful.

Re:Mature industry

[jafomatic]

This looks good, but change all uses of "helped," to "facilitated."

Thanks, and make sure to carbon each VP and appropriate secretaries.

It works! It really works!

[ClayJar]

I have a friend whose company was bidding on a contract. Part of the forms they had to fill out was their company's mission statement. Well, since they didn't have a mission statement, and since it was a *required* field on the form, he went to Dilbert.com and fetched one of these lovely (*cough*) mission statements.

They got the contract, in part because the client thought they had a good mission statement. (Needless to say, they never told the client where they came up with it.)

Re:Mature industry

[jonadab]

So basically you're saying that we need to follow up our action opportunity
by revisiting our objectives and re-orienting our goals according to an
open-source mindset so that we can pro-actively leverage agglutinative team
dynamics and team-building best practices to create bottom-up holistic synergy
through the empowerment and integration of key team players on the front lines
of our sales and production demographics into our prioritized mind share, so
as to focus everyone on the same page going forward in a fault-tolerant,
results-driven, and robust expectations paradigm that will initiate strategic
core competencies in our interpersonal assets management, foster win-win
outside-the-box thinking in our targeted skill-set networking and group-to-group
issues collaboration ecosystem, set us on a critical path to achieve total
quality in our quality-driven, services-oriented resources management game
plan, monetize the reusability of our top-down multitasking approach, and
up-sell the competition in the new economy.