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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?"
the creation of incoherent language was the first technology. its been downhill since then.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
We have a finely tuned bullshitometer here: My wife. She is so synical and sick and tired of the horsedung put out by marketers nowadays that I'm pretty conifident if I can get past her.
"It's not stealing if you don't get caught!"
It's jargon and buzzwords and nothing more. All companies do that. Nobody buys products based on that. Any company looking at sun will look past the "marketingspeak" and look at the product.
Not everything is analogous to cars. Car analogies rarely work.
Come on, people have been hawking "scalable enterprise empowerment" or "veritcally integrated open groupware" or "user-centric frameworks for collaboration" for a decade.
IMHO, I think the best IT marketers have to be cut from the cloth of a computer nerd.
Because every great killer app does not begin in the mind of a creative marketer or exec, but in some small script or some small app that some hacker/nerd put together to take care of something he immediately needed.
Think about. Every single useful app, I bet, has its ancestry hidden in the roots of some hacker who did it for free.
This doesn't mean all computer nerds make good marketers, but that computer nerds do have the vision to see new openings for products and features. The market can only complain about today, but it really cannot tell you what it will need tomorrow.
Philosophistry
As far as I can tell, "Industry Leading" just means "has a marketing department." (Ditto for "Market Leading").
"Industry Standard" doesn't actually mean what it says, either. These days it just means "We think lots of people do things this way, or at least claim that we think that."
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
Firefox - Rediscover the web.
Thunderbird - Reclaim your inbox.
Is it me or are these weak slogans?
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The best thing that could happen to Sun is for IBM to buy them. It would IBM give them access to Java, they could merge Solaris, AIX and Linux, and Sun hardware would probably sell better than the equivalents in the IBM line.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
Well, the Sun Opteron boxes are selling like hot cakes. The sales of UltraSPARC kit has increased by several 10s of percent in the last couple of quarters, so I suppose one or two people must be installing new Sun kit.
If we believed everything intel and HP were trelling us, we'd realise that every 64-bit platform other than itanic is doomed since itanic is taking over the world and resistance is futile.
But then what would I know? I'm just part of the slashbot groupthink.
Stick Men
Marketers will say whatever people are buying. The real problem is people who don't parse the marketspeak for the info they need, and demand high signal/noise ratios. Part of the problem is making mere marketers into decisionmakers, telling engineers what to buy, and what to build. It's a symptom of the American sales culture, which infects all of us. We're better at selling things to people, like our labor time, than we are at delivering the goods. So the higher-paid decisionmaking jobs are filled with people better able to pitch themselves, rather than better able to make the decisions. The solution is more critical thinking taught in elementary school, where we can learn to intercept marketspeak as well as produce it.
--
make install -not war
Leverage, LeveragingI ns )
Fruitiono llaboration
Synergies, Synergistic
Vulnerability
Attack Vector
Streamline
Deployment
Interactive
Buy-
Stakeholders
Key-Stone
Enterprise
Solution(
Robust
Intuitive
Scalable
Granular Level
Key Performance Indicators
Seamless
Comprehensive offering
meet or exceed
cash reserves
phenomenal growth
Turn-key
Paradigm-Shift, shifting
Product Line
State of the art technology
dedicated team of professionals
significant competitive advantage
diversified
fragmented market
best of breed
win-win situation
Synchronicity
Proven
Cost-Effective
Environment
Proactive (ly)
New Frontiers
Agressive
Empowerment
Vertically integrated
Groupware
User-Centric
Framework
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You can't put a complaint in at the Land Rover site but you can put in a Compliment. If you send them an email, they promise to respond in 48 hours but the last time I did it, it took more than a week and then they only responded to tell me I had to call Customer Service.
Marketing Speak is the SYMPTOM of the problem. The problem is much deeper. It is an indication that the industry has stopped using NEW ideas to create better products, or new products never seen before. It is a sign of a Mature Market.
How can you decide between the $9.95 mouse and the $11.95 one? Buzzwords and Marketing Technobabble.
Or as one of my professors pointed out. When he asked his wife why she like one Fridge over another, she replied that she like the Handle. Everything else was the same in her mind.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
I hate the use of ASAP. When people use it I hear "I am lazy or ignorant and unable to commit to a formal due date."
UNIX/Linux Consulting
This isn't the fault of technology marketers. It's the fault of technologists.
Technology marketing at its best involves telling stories about technology to customers. It's as simple as that. Every time a technologist turns up his nose at a marketer, it makes it more difficult to tell that story. Even if you accept the fact that "engineers! are not good! at communicating! with customers!!!" it's still a fact that in the absence of input from engineers, marketers will be forced to fall back on meaningless cliches in their stories about what you build.
So you know where I'm coming from, I'm a developer-slash-marketer working for a Silicon Valley company you've heard of -- I spend part of my time writing code examples for developers and another (small) chunk of my time writing and editing marketing copy.
Breaking down the barriers between the geeks and the suits is something I've gotten very good at in the last few years. And here's a hint for geeks -- the suits are generally intimidated by you, which means it's your job to reach out to them and make them feel valued.
One of the keys to a successful engineering career is finding companies and projects with to-notch marketing and management teams. This is very difficult because of the extreme rarity of such situations. When you're doing job interviews or looking for new projects within a company, one of the best skills you can have is judging who is truly a talented product manager or marketeer, and who is just a bullshitter.
Like it or not, you have to form a symbiotic relationship with marketing, management and production people to make an impact in engineering. If any part of the whole is below par, the whole effort is likely to fail. However, once in a while all of the contributors are competent, and those are the cases where you'll probably find the most success.
I used to sell Sun back in the mid-90's and I believe their problems run much deeper than just the language. In fact, I re-read Goldratt's "The Goal" and "It's Not Luck" occasionally, and Sun is one of the first companies that comes to mind for the the examples of things they DIDN'T/DONT do. Calling Scott McNealy "fiscally conservative" is an understatement. During the mid- 90's the local Sun office was devastated by workforce reductions and obsessive focussing on "headcount". Tech help was scarce, and morale was as low as I've seen in an office for a high-quality product. They moved from a well-organized top-floor office to a mediocre government-looking office across the street. You can only cut cost so far. You could cut costs to zero, and then where do you go to improve proitability? Sun never made it easy. The manuals were good for techs (although the first editions of some of the Solaris 6 and NIS manuals had major errors in them), the classes were great, but the customer focus was fuzzy and confused, just as the article said. And God help any unsuspecting IT manager who thought he could just load Solaris as easy as loading Windows! My impression was that the frustrations over the complex installation and administration process were major avoidable pitfalls in the Sun marketing plan. Luckily, I was mostly selling against NT 3.51 and had a major performance advantage at the time. The problem is, loading, configuring and administering Solaris is still a tedious, joyless task, even if it's done over a network. Troubleshooting administrative problems is not as easy as it could be, and the docs still suck.
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
*waves*
Current Accenture code drone here. Just for the record, any employee of Accenture who includes the name "Andersen" (or even "Anderson") interchangeably in any communication internally or externally like you just did ("...Andersen helped the chicken use...") can expect a visit from the internal newspeak police at best, and (far more commonly) hideous termination (refer to tome IV of the employee contract for details) on surprisingly short notice...
kartune85 : Incapable of reason, observation or learning. A kind of dim, drab, flightless parrot.
I used to sell computers. Being knowledgable for a long time I tried to just inform the consumer about the computers and let them pick what fit them. I quickly found out that was way too much for them. So I went to offering them 2 computers based on what they told me. I'd say, "if you want your sun to be able to play games or you feel you may want to edit video and movies, I suggest you get this more expensive one. If you are only going to work on documents and surf the web, then you probably will be fine spending less money and getting this one". And you know what? 90% of customers would leave completely confused about what they should buy. They wanted someone to say, "buy this computer" w/o any reason to. Or maybe something like, "it's got colorstream for better quality picture!" but they couldn't give 2 shits about the technology they were actually getting or what it was truely capable of and suited for.
I do security
I know DB2 isn't what most of the slashdot readership would consider technology. But bear with me.
The IBM marketers have so mangled the DB2 trademark that you can't even call IBM and order a flavour of the product or ask for service.
Don't beleive me? Log onto the IBM website and find the SQL manual for DB2 Universal Database for the mainframe. Make sure it's the mainframe manual. Then find out how many flavours of DB2 Universal Database Connect there are and try to distinguish them from each other.
Using Google is cheating. (But, even using Google I bet you're driven crazy within the hour!)
The technology behind DB2 isn't that difficult to understand. But the marketing maze is truly something byzantine.
Now there's a good one. Sun stole that line from Apollo computer. Apollo actually lived up the phrase. Anyone familiar with Domain/OS knows that the entire OS was built from day one with networking in mind.
Apollo had great engineering, but terrible marketing. Sun understood that low price and good developer support would lead to success. Apollo, like so many great technology companies, believed that superior products would win. Instead, most popular and/or cheapest usually wins.
It is sad to see NFS continues to be so widely used despite it's blatant design flaws. In contrast to MS networking, it actually looks good, but in reality, it is a nightmare. Anyone who has fought in the "Automounter Wars" can attest to that!
"No matter where you go, there you are." -- Buckaroo Banzai