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

Enter Bullfighter -- Ole!

[theGreater]

What a coincidince; I was just plugging a BS-o-meter earlier today.
Named "Bullfighter" from Deloitte & Touch, it is an add-in for MSword and PowerPoint. You can download the regular version or a for the nonprofit sector.
-theGreater Picador.

Bullshit Generator Site

[hodet]

Oh! And don't forget the Bullshit Generator.

Re:Working at a Marketing company

[renehollan]

Any static display on a monitor will tend to "burn in" or weaken the phosphor. You'd think this would not be a problem for black areas, which aren't driven, but they remain more sensitive over time than the area that has been driven constantly, and thus will eventually appear brighter.

Newer sets are less prone to this than older ones, unless driven with a high contrast, but it does remain a problem: Every manual I've seen for a direct view CRT notes this and recommends not driving the display with such material more than 15% of the viewing time.

Some sets try to counteract this by displaying grey letterboxed material instead of black, but many people find that more objectionable.

Software engineer glossary of product terminology

[NilsK]

For those having problems with some of these terms I recommend the Software engineer glossary of product terminology.

Nils

Re:Mature industry

[Mateito]

I can't lay me hand on the reference, but recently I came across some "team communication facilitations expert" who went about redefining "dialogue" as (paraphrased) "different from conversation in that dialogue activity includes all team members in the dicussion".

No, wombat. Dialogue. Dia. Two. As in diametric, diagonal, diarrhea.

If you want a word to describe an all-inclusive discourse, this aint it. Go back to wanking 101.

If you don't understand basic word construction, I'm not going to trust your take in expanding that to whole sentences, let alone interraction.