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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?"
Are these signs of a mature industry which is in need of a disruptive change in the market to shake it up?
Will never understand Technology.
I find in every place I've worked that Marketing and Technology NEVER can agree on anything, so why should Sun be any different?
is that this is the only time I want to see the word "synchronicity" being used.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
So, I go into this store, and I ask about such TVs, and all the sales droids yammer on about Sony with "ColorStream!"
WTF is ColorStream? Does that mean component video inputs, i.e. YPbPr that support 720P and 1080i inputs? "No," sales droid says, "ColorStream" gives you a better picture.
It was only by requesting the manual for the set in which I was interested, that I could verify that ColorStream meant YPbPr. And even then, I had do refer to the specification summary page.
I'm sure that many lost sales happen because some sales doofus doesn't know that the product they're flogging actually meets the customer's needs perfectly!
You could've hired me.
Any technology pitch with the words "solution", "rich", or "exciting" and I automatically check to see if my pocket has been picked. "Rich" - now that's rich!
sPh
First, run the "BS Detector" (www.streettech.com/bs) over your website to check for marketing-speak. Then deploy and action these tips:
Convert your online visitors into customers by inviting them to act. Every page should have a clear call to action to get your visitors to take the next step.
Cut to the chase. People scan web pages, they don't read them, and they read at least 30% slower off the screen than off paper. Use active verbs rather than passive ones. It saves words and is more persuasive.
Note all the bolded text in the snippet above. Is this an inside joke? Look at all the BS in those sentences!
Un-news
The market delivers what customers want.
My theory is that the problem, if there is one, is that MBAs are making too many of the technical decisions. (I.e. "Which mail server should we use? Why, Exchange, of course!")
As long as the real customer is a non-technical person, technological products will be marketed this way.
-Peter
could you imagine a Beowulf cluster of thinkers like this in Soviet Russia - where the industry changes you?
Yea, I know, I should have just shut up and modded the parent post as funny. It will be interesting to watch though, the parent smacks of a funny post that is in danger of being modded insightful.
A goal is a dream with a deadline
Is mission critical. It's a seriously overused, and tragically misunderstood phrase.
Here's a good working definition of "mission critical". If you'd be willing to hang upside down out of a 10 story window by a rope that gets cut if your software crashes, then it's mission critical. If not, then it isn't. Be sure and ask your salesperson if they'd be willing to undergo this test to prove their software's mission critical reliability.
Hardware and software where people's lives are on the line are mission critical. Think Apollo missions and nuclear power plants, folks. Anything else, isn't.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Talking to your existing customers works fine in a static market. You can still win even if the technology is changing but the customers remain the same. "The Innovator's Dilemma" pulls a lot of material from a large study of the disk drive industry. Incumbent players stayed in business through radical changes in technology, dying only from changes in the market.
Changes in the market happen when a "disruptive" technology comes along. "Disruptive" doesn't mean you have to rip out your assembly line: the disk drive makers succeeded at that several times. "Disruptive" means something that redefines the market.
The personal computer is a clear example. Like other disruptive technologies it was cheaper than what was already there, sold to a different set of customers, and wasn't as good (*at first*) as the incumbent technology. DEC's customers continued using VAXen to do work that wouldn't fit on the first personal computers.
Then the new customers buy in volume, mass production drives down the price, high volume pays for improvements, and before you can say "386" the disruptive technology is undermining the old technology. Companies like DEC wind up selling "proven" solutions to a shrinking customer base. Eventually they die.
"Marketing", in its highest and most useful form, involves getting into the heads of your customers and understanding what they need before they know it themselves. But the future lies with people who are not your customers.
The book listed other examples including hydraulic earth-moving equipment, but the principle was the same.
It's jargon and buzzwords and nothing more.
That is mostly correct. Decision makers do get deaf to words they hear too much. But, tech marketing is also a numbers (or versions) game. For instance, is Company A's Superpro 1700 better than Company B's Megapro 1600? The people making decisions don't know what the numbers mean. That marketing hype is in all areas of hardware from the computers to video cards and monitors (my 19" LCD has a screen that is actually 17" - but the casing is 19"). It is also in software - just look at IE and Netscape's version jockying in the past.
The previous comment is purposely vague and generalized, but all of the facts are completely true.
That is how the world once worked, perhaps, or never did but should work. This is the capitalist ideal: best product wins. Unfortunately this is not the world we live in. We live in a commercialist world, which is perhaps an (inevitable?) end-point of capitalism but is not the same thing. In commercialism, not the best product, but the best marketing wins. I see examples of this everywhere, every day. This a huge part of the world's problems. (Think: lobbying... governments are swayed by rhetoric and money rather than by the actual issues at hand. It's the same deal.)
Does anyone thing IT decision makers are actually influnced by any of this?
It's a complete ruse.
This type of advertisement is targeted directly at investors.
It is not inteded to nor should it be judged on its effect on actual technology customers.
Do you thing GE advertizes jet engines to increase jet engine sales?
You can mod me down, but you cannot call me a coward.
"It is what IT is."
So companies engage in this behavior simply for the altruistic end of keeping marketing people (who are clearly not qualified to do anything else) off the street?
I suddenly have much warmer feelings toward corporate America.
-Peter
Deciding if marketing-speak is BS based on buzzword matching/frequency counting is just sinking to their level. It's as devoid of semantics and real thought as buzzword matching to do hiring. After all, there's always a marketing/engineering disconnect, so this will likely tell you zilch about the technology.
If you want to evaluate a technology, evaluate the technology -- ignore all of the marketing. Be empirical. Actually play with the technology. If they won't let you get your hands on it, then be suspicious.
Responding to the original post, that's right if you define "maturity" for an industry to mean "the point at which a significant fraction of those involved don't understand what they're saying and just pass along marketspeak like neurons in a big brain processing signals."
> But it isn't just Sun, surely.
There's dumb marketing everywhere.
But Sun could have the best marketing on the planet and still not be selling their products (hardware and OS), which have been largely commoditized. Yes, they have high-end servers...but years ago, cheaper Intel/AMD boxes weren't considered "server-class" hardware like they are now.
There is a larger issue: Sun's ability to "pull an IBM" and figure out how to leverage the changing software/hardware world instead of defending their market share.
Technology will never understand Marketing. The two are different concepts with different goals. Marketing's goal is to attract the people who spend the money and make the big overall decisions to their technology. Technology's goal is to explain itself to the people who have to implement it.
Unfortunately, many technology leaders think Marketing is just cunning language and empty promises. So when they make a terribly useful technology, they fail to explain it and instead spin a picture of what it COULD be.
It is not just companies, either. Take a look at the product pages on Apache.org and see how long it takes to figure out exactly what a technology does, what platforms it works on, what language it works with and how to connect to it. Some of them are good. Most of the time, this information vital to deciding whether the technology is useful or not is hidden three or four links in, and occasionally it's not there at all. I mean, what the fuck is this? (rhetorical question, don't answer). Furthermore, the names of the projects are apocryphal and completely undescriptive. "Do we use Cocoon or Veocity for this project?" Who knows.
Technology is massively complicated. Just think of the question "What is Linux?" The term is used simulateously, by different people, to refer to a Kernel, to refer to a set of development tools, to refer to a GUI, to refer to a development philosophy, etc. Marketing's job is to boil off the variables you don't need to make a purchasing decision, and spice up the biggest advantages. If marketing isn't doing that, if all they're doing is making insane promises or coming up with wierd names, fire your marketing department. They're wasting your money.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
What Sun lacks is good marketing (maybe b/c of a lack of good strategy and new technologies).
Marketing is about creating awareness and a favorable first impression. It is only when the marketing message is consistent with the technology that it is powerful. Case in point: Apple's "Switch" campaing did a great job creating the impresion that with OS X, your average user could switch painlessly. I did and it was painless. That's good marketing. My experience has been that some of the brightest designers have a difficult time articulating WHAT something does without inserting too much of HOW it does it.
(Marketing Manager and hobby programmer)
Just look at Solaris 10 (a big upgrade from Solaris 8 and 9) and the coming Niagara systems (32-way on a single chip and system board--thousands of threads and terabytes of RAM in a rack). Also, the SunOS kernel is nothing to laugh at. Java will always be debated, but it is fundamentally useful.
I've always had the impression that Sun does make mistakes, but they can stomach the lessons from them. For example, I'd hope that the limited market for MAJC (a dual core CPU) has at least given them a running start for UltraSPARC IV and Niagara. Some people say that IBM beat Sun to dual core with POWER, but Sun did have one--just not UltraSPARC.
The problem with the auto industry in the 1970s and 1980s is that they just produced utter stinking crap. I wonder if auto engineers from that period could have engineered their way out of an open box, looking at the terrible emissions controls (god-awful cobwebs of vacuum hoses and unreliable EGR values and carburetors from hell among other things) and the poor performance and economy of their cars. They put 90HP four-cylinder engines into 4000lb. SUVs back then...that's how terrible they were.
Really, the only thing I worry about regarding Sun is that no one is willing to pay top dollar for a battle-tank-like workstation (SPARCstations, early Ultras), so Sun has inevitably gone to less expensive cases that aren't built from riveted heavy gauge steel. Otherwise, their hardware is generally very good and Solaris is quite good, and ever year they do make real progress. I'm already debating if I want Solaris 10 at home.
-- "Makes Little Debbie look like a pile of puke!" - Moe Szyslak
It's too late. Sun has already gotten in bed with MS.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
One thing marketing people are really really really good at marketing is their ownselves.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
The basic problem is that marketing is charged with explaining a technology to non-technologists. Often these technologies are quite difficult to explain. For example, how do you explain an identity management system to a CFO?
Now, the knee-jerk slashdot reaction is to say that the CFO has no business making technology decisions. It is his business, however, to determine what the company is spending money on. Is this identity management system some IT toy? Or is it something that will make the company more profitable?
You need to be able to explain technology to non-technologists in order for good technologies to sell, especially when those technologies are expensive.
Buzzwords evolve when someone develops a way of expressing something that actually means something. Then others latch on to those words and dilute the strength of their meaning. Over time, people forget what the original meaning even was.
Paradigm is a real world with a real meaning. In terms of describing technology, however, it has lost all semblance of meaning because it is now used to mean anything. Once upon a time, however...
So you save money if you have $10 in your pocket, unfortunately, most people only have 50c available.
It's good, but you missed out my favorite (in the sense of not-at-all-favorite) words:
/. that this is standard American usage, so to criticize would be flamebait.
Envision - A nice catch-all which replaces 'see', 'visualize', 'envisage', 'imagine', etc.
Leveraging - 'Leverage' is a noun in my book ('Collins Concise English Dictionary', since you ask). The verb is 'to lever', so presumably for 'leveraging', I should read 'levering', which usually doesn't make any sense at all.
Utilize - What's wrong with 'use', for fuck's sake?!!
Off of - Musn't really complain about this. I've learnt from
I've hated that one for years. "We're a solutions provider." Really? Well your "solution" has "provided" me with more downtime then uptime, dork! No body makes anything...they're "solutions providers." I say anytime you're at a convention and someone tells you they provide "solutions" it should be code for "pop me in the mouth." Hell, let's make it a game!
is when they come up with a new marketing buzzword and then don't give you any way to connect with it. Take Throughput Computing for example. Lots of processors for multithreading. That's cool, I'm into that. But I'm far more likely to see that on an Intel processors than anything from Sun. Unique hardware? No. Unique software? No. By unique I mean can you do anything that you can't do more cost effectively on non Sun hardware and software? And the answer is no.
Theocracy: A government ruled by or subject to religious authority.
This statement is simply not true.
I'll bite. First the parent's sig says that America is ...fast becoming a...theocracy, it ain't yet, but it's fast becoming one. Lets start with a few choice quotes from GWB, and we'll let the audience decide:
"God told me to strike at al Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did..." - GWB to Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas
"Our nation has been chosen by God and commissioned by history, to be a model of justice before the world."
"I believe God has called us into action. Our country has got a responsibility, we are a great nation, we are a wealthy nation, we have a responsibility to help a neighbour in need, a brother and sister in crisis." -GWB in July 2003 in Uganda
Now, I'm not saying that what GWB is saying is bad (I'm certainly won't say it is good though), but if the USA is such a secular state, why is God's name brought up when it comes to Foreign Policy and Foreign Aid decisions? And don't give me that all encompassing "one God" crap, because although some religions believe in that, not all do, and some of us don't believe in a God at all. So if the USA is truly secular, why mention God?
Oh, and I don't know where you get off thinking that the religion that gets given the hardest time is Christianity. The religion that lost all of its unfairly earned priviledges is Christianity (e.g. loss of prayer in school, loss of slavery (yes, slavery is something advocated by the bible), loss of homosexual persecution), but it is just recent propaganda to say it has had the hardest time when compared to all the other religions that are practiced in the USA.
I'll agree with you that the USA is about the freedom of religion, but you are blind and ignorant if you deny that the current US government does not lean a certain amount of favour towards Christianity above and beyond what is acceptable in a secular state.
I'm a writer, a poet, a genius, I know it. I don't buy software, I grow it.
There is a huge problem with people working in a technological company who have no interest in or knowledge of technology. Not only do they feel pressured to lie when they don't know what they are doing, they can't always detect when they are lying. They become robot liars representing their company.
This kind of thing affects more than the technology industry. It's only natural that people who work in companies that pretend to be sane would vote for a president who pretends to be sane.
--
Bush: Spending money the U.S. doesn't have to make himself look good.