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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. --
Who can come up with worse?
This thread is quickly going to be "That's nothing. This one time..."
Free XBox, PS2
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?
Currently I am proactively generating a synergistic environment where I can bring to fruition a new paradigm in answering questions of this nature.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
That's unpossible!
is that this is the only time I want to see the word "synchronicity" being used.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
I've been reaching for the bleeding edge of technology for so long, my fingers really hurt now...
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!"
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.
--from earlier today.
The Statue of Liberty is America's lawn jockey.
"Sun is going to fail in this decade if ...."
Uh.... didn't Sun fail last decade??
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
Come on, people have been hawking "scalable enterprise empowerment" or "veritcally integrated open groupware" or "user-centric frameworks for collaboration" for a decade.
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
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
This has been around for a while (since 2000 I think), but I still get a laugh out of it:
Catbert's Mission statement generator
Perfect for this thread!
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.
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.
they even used the word "paradigm" !
7 120917901
http://www.linuxelectrons.com/article.php/2004090
I mean, just look at those numbers!
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
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.
Is it value-added?
A goal is a dream with a deadline
As a geek, and unable to understand "business-esse" AND looking for a job in the mid to late 90's, AND (most importantly) on a dare, I used one of the "BS Generators" to fluff up my "objective" on my resume. To my shagrin - it worked! I got more pegs/emails/phone calls on that particular resume than I ever have - previous or after. I truly think the "businessey-type" people really DO believe their own BS - and the "Mission Statements".
A two stories below this one, the following gem lies:
Privately funded in 1993, now with customers in 40 countries* and over $67 million** in cash reserves, the company experienced a phenomenal growth and continues to aggressively pursue new frontiers in order to meet or exceed the needs of most demanding customers by providing a scalable, seamless, comprehensive offering.
Leveraging our paradigm-shifting product line with state of the art technology developed by a dedicated team of professionals, we offer a significant competitive advantage on the diversified but fragmented market of best of breed anti-spam solutions.
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
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
C
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."
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.
> 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
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.
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!"
I no longer have a copy... but I'm sure it said something about me being able to "synergistically re-engineer convergent e-technology" or some such BS :-B
I have a friend whose company was bidding on a contract. Part of the forms they had to fill out was their company's mission statement. Well, since they didn't have a mission statement, and since it was a *required* field on the form, he went to Dilbert.com and fetched one of these lovely (*cough*) mission statements.
They got the contract, in part because the client thought they had a good mission statement. (Needless to say, they never told the client where they came up with it.)
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...
In an essay titled, tediously, "Crashdot?", an anonymous reader wonders how long the popular technology discussion forum Slashdot can survive in the face of its editors' blatant ignorance of grammatical errors that a child of 5 would find embarrassing. "Slashdot is going to fail this year if it does nothing but post duplicated articles, week-old news and obvious trolls", says the author. He adds: "If you are someone who never gets tired of misplaced apostrophes, mixed tenses, and generally incomprehensible prose, then subscribe to Slashdot and read as many of their article summaries as you can stomach." But it isn't just Slashdot, surely. This is a failing of online journalism in general. Hmm, doubtless we can all come up with our own examples far equally awful as those seen on Slashdot. Who can come up with worse?
That's not too bad. I mean, the last 3 words actually tell you what they sell...
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.