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Scalable Enterprise Buzzword Solutions
prostoalex writes "Need a scalable enterprise solution? You're in luck, as those three buzzwords have become so prominent in the technology industry, that they can describe pretty much anything, according to Associated Press. The article later goes on to blame Microsoft and Apple for 'dumbing down' the product descriptions in order to appeal to non-tech-savvy audiences. 'High-tech companies don't release products anymore, they provide solutions. And those solutions don't simply run a program or play a song. Instead, they enable experiences, optimize agility or make people's passions come alive', the AP article states."
Solutions replaced products long ago - at least 5 years, anyway. Were you in a hole in 1999 during the dot com IPO craze?
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This is the work of IBM and the rest of the "services" oriented consultants. KPMG, Anderson, etc. A group of highly paid morons.
But in the long run, services is actually the driving force in computing. Products are fine, but upon those products is a whole ecology of companies providing support, enhancement, and integration of those products, tailored for each individual company.
In fact, this is what makes Open Source software so attractive. It sure as hell isn't good to be the company developing the software, but it is really good to be a service provider using that software. No longer do you need to pay for the software, you only need to pay for support.
I guess this could be a double edged sword for customers, though. It seems that there would be an incentive to keep OSS as obtuse and inscrutable as possible to maximize support income. This obviously wouldn't happen with a commercial product that has to prove its worth by being easier to use and generally better than the equivalent OSS package, just to compete.
To sell anything, you have to pitch the product to the person with the signing power. If your target customers are six year old girls you paint it pink and sparkly. If your target customer is a CEO/CIO + board of directors then you dress it up with buzzwords and phrases. Technical details are stuff these folk don't understand add confusion.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
'High-tech companies don't release products anymore, they provide solutions. And those solutions don't simply run a program or play a song. Instead, they enable experiences, optimize agility or make people's passions come alive'
OR, those solutions route phone calls, let you manage and share your calendar or take a picture of your license plate when you run a red light.
Those buzzwords do have definitions. Its the simpletons in Marketing and PR who try to decsribe shit without understanding what the shit does or how it will be used.
I've often wondered if the vague descriptions served a another purpose, which is to throw off your potential competition by not telling anyone what you do... Maybe thats why those companies usually have no customers...
After reading the article, I'd say he's basically bashing new jargon because he doesn't see a need for it.
... uh... blah.
I would say most of what he sites is pretty silly, but "Scalable?"
I can't think of a better word to describe something as highly functional as scalable, even if sometimes it applies to things it really shouldn't matter for.
But we'll take for instance a simple peer to peer file sharing network. Some file sharing networks simply don't scale well to thousands of users, or hundreds of thousands but work really well for a few dozen. So knowing weather or not something like this is scalable enough to demonstrate to a small office, then deploy company wide. Knowing something like that REALLY WILL save you some heartache later one.
Or how about rendering engines? Some scale DOWN as well as up. A good scalalbe engine means software will drop features on low end hardware, and take advantage of more on newer hardware.
Some jargon is useful.
But others are just annoying. I still hate the term "BLOG". We already has sufficient terms to describe most post and forum sites, but the term BLOG implies a specific type and now sites that aren't really blogs are being called blogs by the internet newcomers who don't know any better.
So
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
He longs to see the demise of "scalable," for instance, which is tech lingo for something that can get bigger.
While other things discussed in the article are just plain silly, scalability is a real feature of software. It should be discussed in marketing material, and customers should ask about it if its not. I guess the inability to discern between buzzwords and features extends, beyond marketers and purchasers, to the writer of the article.
... find out if a sales guy pushing a "solution" actually has only vapor or something real to offer.
Just ask him what his "solution" solves for your business.
Sometimes buzzwords actually work in the customers favor.
That guy is a whiney bitch. His examples are totally bogus.
Enterprise = Anything dealing with corporations
Scalable = Anything that can support growth
Blog = Web Log. Its a fucking diary.
I was expecting to see shit like "Synergy", but "Data Migration"?!? How the hell can you be in the IT industry and not understand Data Migration?
What a douche bag!
"The marketing people are so bad at hyping their products that, with all my experience, I'll have to read and reread and reread just to figure out what this thing does," says Freedman, founder of The Computer Language Company Inc. in Point Pleasant, Pa.
I don't even bother with marketing materials any more. I google for "$PRODUCT problem resolved" or somesuch.
My personal opinion is that marketers should be legally liable for making false or even potetially misleading statements. I implemented a BI/Broker (A Business Intelligence package, if you'll excuse the oxymoron) install, all the while knowing that the thing was essentially worthless without us puting in the intelligence that the thing needed. A simple spreadsheet would have done the same, with less hardware/software/programing. It was OMG Cool to the buzz-word compliant people though, since the marketing weenies did such a good job of hood winking senior management. In the end, the company used 1/4 of the systems functionality, and the rest was done by spreadsheet. Go figure.
Really, I wonder how 'scaleable' the marketers personal wallets are, after I've spent my employers money of a product that only does half the job I thought it would, and I can recover costs because they lied.
Marketing is lies, more lies and damned lies in a pretty package so you'll put your money and reputation on the line. The whole premise is to extract money from your companies shareholders and give it to thier shareholders. Remember that the next time a sales weenie takes you out for lunch.
Soko
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
I think the emphasis was on "executives", many of whom mistakenly consider themselves to be technology experts.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
My pet peeve is that, when things go wrong, they're "issues". "Your car has a tree issue" has become the kind of BS we hear every day. They're PROBLEMS. It's OK to have problems - otherwise, who's going to buy your solutions?
--
make install -not war
We've been making fun of this for years. My pet peeve of the moment is the over-use of slightly ambiguous statements followed by "from a this-or-that perspective".
Example: Instead of saying "What is your schedule?" I get: "What is your timeline, from a scheduling perspective?"
Or, instead of "How is the project going?", I get: "How are things going, from a project perspective?"
I swear to God that the people I work with can't form a sentence without this. It drives me nuts. That, and people who say "processees". Fucking ignorant.
Does it matter to you if a power supply is called a power cube or a consumer energy solution?
Yes, because if I read an ad for a "consumer energy solution", I have no idea what it is. How is that being specific?
Is it a battery pack? Is it a gasoline powered generator? Is it some miniature fusion reactor that I can put in my basement and "solve" my "energy problem" (eg: Paying my utility bills...)? Even "Power Cube" is horrible. Sounds like a game console. "Desktop computer power supply." That's specific - and rather non-techical!
(I know your post was just an example, but so was mine!)
=Smidge=
We know that people buy stuff of spam. I saw a $2 pan being sold as a custom $10 fondue set. MS tells us that employees are incapable of using anything other than MS Windows. Apple tells us that you are a square if you don't use Macs. IBM promises massive profits if you use the complete solution. Sun says that IBM is ripping everyone off. It is game and learning to play it is part of our brand of capitalism.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
The actual point of the law reference was that it's a conflict of interest for lawyers to write laws, that they and their peers have to interpret. Congress should be given an eigth grade dictionary and not allowed to use any word not in it.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
For someone on the selling side, it's more profitable to sell value-based 'solutions' rather than technology where he has to compete on price.
For someone on the buying side, getting a "solution" may be more expensive, or it may be cheaper if one doesn't want to be ones own integrator and support department. You are basically paying for reduced hassle. The trick is quantifying the value of your own hassle, and the liklihood the 'solution' will have its own hassles, and their cost. Different people will evalutate these things differently.
-dB
"It if was easy to do, we'd find someone cheaper than you to do it."
If you let marketing promise things, you will get sued, because that's probably not what engineering built.
;)
Look at the iPod shuffle, marketing thought it was edible, before the webmaster caught it
So, let marketing spew their BS, just unspecific buzzword BS, and everyone is happy except the customer.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
It's not the words. The words are good. It's how they are used, misunderstood, and misused.
Fortunately, I mostly deal with people who admit they don't know much of what's out there -- it's silly to claim you do since there's so much tech out there it's just not possible.
The people who cover up what they do/do not know in an attempt to look "smart" are a big problem. These people either think they know it all or don't want anyone to know that they don't. They don't listen. They aren't curious. They get angry or dismissive or just talk right past you as if "we're all in agreement". Meanwhile, they don't know what you're talking about -- and don't want you to know it. The worst ones are actively ignorant -- pushing bad opinions around and acting on them unilaterally.
These folks never ask questions like "What is that?", "How does it work?", "What's it like?", or "Can you give me an example?". If you ask them these types of questions, they will look at you strange. It's like middleschool all over again.
Had a guy the other day tell me "Good! You're using an all Microsoft solution!" when I mentioned that the web site was developed using Coldfusion. Having delt with this guy a few dozen times, I knew it was useless to correct him. While it's true that you can run Coldfusion on Windows, in this case it wasn't running under Windows...let alone CF being a Macromedia product not a Microsoft one.
Unfortunately, I have to deal with this guy because he has his claws in the small business I'm helping out. Part of his stupidity might be from the panic I feel talking to him; he knows I could take his business away. That I don't care to doesn't seem to matter to him -- I *could do it*. You can bet I'm going to limit my exposure to him.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
I don't know if the people using synergy actually know what it means,
If I'm reading the cards correctly (on rather scanty hints), the reason that "synergy" has become such a Dirty Word amoung us realists is that while synergy is a real thing and can have outstanding benefits, in its typical use it is almost always indicates a suicide pact in progress. "Synergy" is typically used as the major reason behind a merger, and "synergy" mergers almost always fail because of the underestimation of both companies of the difficulty in merging cultures.
(Culture is such a soft, fuzzy thing, right, and it couldn't be hard at all to make everything mesh, right? You'd think so, because it's basically impossible to put into words why it is difficult (at least not without it sounding silly or trivial), thus for many people not accostomed to thinking without words it is also impossible to think. Nevertheless, history shows it is so difficult it may border on the impossible for sufficiently large companies.)
AOL + Time Warner is probably one of the biggest examples of this. Sure, on paper the synergy was mind-blowing. In reality, the combined company was completely unable to execute. (In fact, the lack of execution almost completely boggles the mind.)
"Synergy" seems to lead a lot of companies to doom; they see the benefits but fail to see the costs.
I've been on more than one project where the high-end technical architecture was decided at the golf course -- after which, half the little people were burned by trying to make it all work, and the other half were burned by saying it wouldn't work. Nobody thought to blame the bloody golfer.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
No, it's not. A word processor is not scalable; you can only have 1 person using 1 instance at a time. If a software package can be used on modest hardware -- and tossing more hardware at it makes that one instance more capable -- it's scalable.
I agree that throwing hardware at poorly designed software can be a mistake if other similar software doesn't need the extra gear. How well it scales does matter...though at the point you start asking those types of questions you're often dealing with a specific environment.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
Upgrading a PC so the games play faster is not an example of scaleability.
A MMORPG that runs on a server farm is scaleable if adding more boxes allows more players in the same instance of a virtual world. If it only allows more isolated games, it's not scaleable.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
It was supposed to be several things:
The reason no one really knows, or will ever know, is because, first, every business unit at MS was ordered to find some way, any way, to label themselves as .NET, thus diluting the whole brand before anyone even knew what it was; and second, MS couldn't commit itself to .NET 100%, and as result, many developers are already planning on skipping .NET because Avalon, XAML et al are already in the pipeline for Longhorn.
It's too bad, in a way. .NET and C# have a lot of good points (if only by fixing Java's obvious shortcomings); a really good standard library to simplify win32 programming is always to be desired. But .NET will never have the ubiquity it needs for the higher order benefits to really pay off. What they should have done with Longhorn was call it "the native .NET OS" or something like that (and announce Longhorn technologies as additions to .NET), so that developers feel that .NET has both longevity and ubiquity. As it stands, MS has fatally undercut .NET by announcing the technologies that will replace it.
As for what will happen now, .NET will survive for a decade or so as a major but never dominant technology because of points #1 and #2. #3 will see some token uses but never really become a selling point for anything. With Passport's demise, #4 is already dead, and its market is being eaten by things like federated identity management.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
I think you've missed the definition of the word 'literally'. You haven't used the word hogwash anywhere else in that piece, than in your explanatory conclusion. Therefore, you should say 'essentially nothing' or some such, instead of 'literally hogwash'.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
It sorta makes me wonder how did those upper management types start wanting buzzwords to start with. But more importantly, this hurts this industry in pretty perverse ways, not just in the obvious "so the biggest liar gets the sale."
For example time after time again, we run into the perverse problem that PHBs don't just prefer bullshit bingo to technical specs. They think that technical specs _are_ pretentious bullshit buzzwords.
For example, if I say that a program is based on MDB (Message Driven Beans) and SOAP, it really means "it complies with the EJB specs, the whole book that that spec is, especially the part about messaging. Which also tells you that you need a J2EE application server to run it. And you have this other SOAP spec that tells you _exactly_ the message format _and_ how to parse it, in case your engineers need it."
I.e., there's a lot of technical information condensed into those two words. (MDB and SOAP.) I _could_ copy and paste the whole specs, or just use those abbreviations to tell people where to look for all the technical details.
But try telling "based on EJB and SOAP" to a management or marketting PHB, and they won't even think "bah, I don't have time for technical details." They won't even hear that as technical detail. They'll hear "based on pretentious made-up buzzword 1 and pretentious made-up buzzword 2".
Somewhere deep down in their psyche, they just "know" that we do nothing all day long but think up buzzwords to intimidate them with.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Nothing personal, but I hate the system that created you. More to the point, those idiots you "do lunch" with.
Business and technical decisions are taken by people _completely_ unqualified, based purely on "oh, I know that guy. We played golf. Let's buy whatever he's selling." Or on "but the nice salesperson said it would solve all the problems, including cancer, AIDS and world hunger." Or here _literally_, and in that manager's own words, a broken product got bought "because it had the nicer powerpoint presentation." (To make it even more surrealistic, a product noone needed.)
And I've been on the receiving end of that fuck-up entirely too often. Completely dysfunctional "solutions" are bought like that. And then we engineers and admins have to make a completely broken product work. And if it still doesn't, then it obviously has to be our fault. Because the nice salesperson told the PHB that it works, and surely the nice salesperson couldn't have possibly lied to the customer. It must be those mean engineers that sabotage it.
And even _if_ the problem does eventually get to be acknowledged by the PHB, the next result is more lunches done, more colourful powerpoint foils are presented, and the PHB buys an even more broken v2.0 of the same product. (Or, don't laugh, some PHBs here are looking forward to version 6.0 of a totally broken product.) Surely now all problems are fixed. Because the nice salesperson said so.
So I can't say I hate you, as such. Where there's a demand, someone creates the supply. I.e., if some PHBs actually want to be lied to and scammed, yep, the system also produced the marketting people who do that. Perfectly normal economics there.
What I would however like to see fixed is the system.
For starters, I'd like to see some serious liability in this industry. Because this hiding behind an EULA that says "whatever happened, it's your problem, not ours" is just legalizing bigger and bigger marketting frauds. So I'd like to see people and companies facing a billion sized lawsuit if they mis-represented a product as doing what it really doesn't.
Also, while I guess one can't outlaw bullshit buzzwords as such, I'd like to see it legally mandatory to clarify (A) exactly what it means, and (B) exactly on what case studies it had that effect.
E.g., "synergy"? Ok. Between what and what? On what cases did you notice that synergistic effect? And how big was it?
E.g., "lower TCO"? Fine. On what use case? Compared to what? (Most of this crap would only lower TCO compared to carving that data by hand on stone blocks, like in the Flintstones.) And how much lower was the TCO, then? Does that include the cost of the uber-expensive consultants to make it work, or?
E.g., "scalable"? Good. Scalable in which way? And in which way is that better than just the plain-old using a cluster and load-balancer?
Etc.
Then maybe we'll see _some_ (minimal) honesty in advertising in our lifetimes. And then we nerds wouldn't have to be disgusted by the whole marketting bullshit.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.