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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!"
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
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.
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.
*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