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

Re:Worse?

[Frizzle Fry]

The point isn't that the current president is a Christian. Every president we've had (as far as I know) has been a Christian. The point is that government policy should not be made in the interest of pushing or assisting a particular reason. This is not the letter of the Constitution (it simply guarantees that there will no official state religion), but is the spirit of it in many people's opinion. And recently, the government had done a decent job of it. But now, that is rapidly not the case. As a few examples, tax dollars are now being taken away from (asecular) public schools and given to parochial ("charter") schools, and the US governemnt tends to support the Isrealis rather than Palestinians because the Christian bible somewhat recognizes Isreal as belonging to the Jews (ok, that's been the case since for a while).

The fact that we get to vote is irrelevant. A tyranny of the majority where a large portion of the country who are all of the same religion used their numbers to elect a leader who would create a government with their religion as the official one (hypothetically) would not be acceptable, even though the people of that religion were able to get their leader accepted in an election. You need to protect the rights of everyone, even minority groups.