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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."
I call it being specific. Does it matter to you if a power supply is called a power cube or a consumer energy solution? Seriously though, the ones that provide "solutions" are selling custom products and appropriate services, so it would be difficult to explicitly state what it is that they sell, while the consumer market is uber-specific. MS would not sell you a "solution," at least not in the same sense that it would sell a giant multinational a data management solution. Or something like that.
A blog like any other.
was the world's first "solutions" company. The big-iron dinosaurs -- the DECs, the Amdahls, the Univacs -- were all talking about "solutions" long before Microsoft and Apple.
All in all, a stupid article from a moron too lazy to do any research.
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'
It's about flexibility. Well, I started by using OS X simply because it was a more productive OS environment than IRIX, Solaris, Windows or yes, Linux. I could use one environment to run specific scientific code, run Office and Photoshop along with serving up webpages and other high end tasks including cluster computing all in one environment that allowed me to replace an SGI, and a Windows machine with one OS X box. The fact that I could also use iTunes, iPhoto, iDVD etc....etc....etc....allows me to also use them at home and suggest OS X running Macintosh systems for my family who knows very little about computers. If Apple can do that and market to both the high end and the low end with one solution, more power to them.
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When I hear these buzz words I immediately assume that whatever the hell they are selling is not as good as the words may lead you to think. They're saying something but they are hiding something. Damned weasels.
Give me benchmarks! Give me comparisons!
I have to "interface" with the AdExecs on a regular basis at work, and they are so god damn annoying. Always sitting around "doing lunch" whilst creating "PowerPoints" to present to the upper-echelons of management, showing how they have "factored-in" their latest and greatest "thinking outside-of-the-box".
Makes me so enraged I want to throw up and shoot them at the same time. Grrr.
I guess what really pisses me off is the fact that they get paid to do the same basic job I do. Bullshit the bosses ;)
She's built like a steak house, but she handles like a bistro....
Providing and selling services are completely okay with me, too, as long as it's possible to figure out what those services actually are. Where I have the problem is when the marketing lingo that's describing the product or service is so abstract and general that it's impossible to figure out what on earth the product or service actually does.
For many tech companies these days, it's downright impossible to figure out what they actually do from their marketing material. It's just full of buzz-words that mean absolutely nothing. Instead of saying they'll build software to suit your needs, they promote themselves as having cohesive teams who'll provide scalable solutions to assist in optimising the dynamic agility of your business. Huh?
I can't understand how someone looking for software to be built, or for someone to out-source their payroll system to, or whatever else, could possible figure out to contact to a company that uses that type of marketing. This is one of the reasons that I really don't like working in tech, because there's so much focus on spouting rubbish instead of getting to the point... whether that point be that a company will build products, or provide a service. Apparently it works, though, because these buzzword businesses seem to be thriving.
I think this is the point of the article.
Check out their web page for the Xserve. It's their enterprise product and it's also their most technical page. It has little of their standard marketing flare and is loaded with tech specs.
I guess that all buzzword and no product stuff is why Apple recently announced Mac mini, iPod shuffle, iLife and iWork.
I guess they also are not selling big honking displays or yet another version of their iMac.
What do you have to do to lose the buzzword moniker, reinvent an entire industry?
Yes. A word freak. I knew when he started spouting off about pauses in sentences when people speak (Uhh...ummm...etc...things normal people do) that we were dealing with a overzealous word nazi. Sure the buzzword mindless marketing/sales drone approach gets irritating. I'm in a company drenching in these assholes. With their pressed shirts...525i. But what is interesting, is to watch the company whores turn on themselves. Oh they do. They do it bad. And the worst of them are WOMEN. Vicious little beasts.
Whomever dreamt up "Solution" in the IT world should be shot.
(I don't think it was Microsoft or Apple).
I had a client who wanted to send invoices out as PDF documents via Email. They have a system in place already that generates Invoice forms on laser printers and wanted it duplicated and produced as PDF/email. (a timeline of yesterday of course).
So, I call up the company that wrote the Forms software they were already using as their new version supported creation of PDF documents as well as emailing them. Should be easy right? Wrong.
Couldn't buy the software, instead the company wanted to provide a "Solution", the salesperson wouldn't even give an idea of the price for the 'solutions', but demanded we wade through a web demo with him for an afternoon before it was to be discussed.
So, after having a little back and forth phone tag / negotiations we said forget it and I found a nice piece of software which could convert PCL to PDF and supported PDF Encryption / Access restrictions.
Dropped the program onto the server, spent an afternoon making adjustments to the process to add email support and presto; PDF Documents via Email.
A company that doesn't let potential customers know about its products will usually die quickly. This is a fundamental business truth that is often obscured by the obnoxious and sometimes deliberately misleading actions of marketers. Think of the number of great applications, for example, that don't do well in the market because the people behind the apps didn't have effective marketing.
If your company can make good products that match the expectations you set with your marketing, then you're good to go. The problem is that so many companies don't understand that if you overpromise and underdeliver, people will wise up. It may take years, but eventually they'll grow suspicious of your exorbitant promises.
What is really sad is the scenario you outlined, in which the people who can best judge the effectiveness of a product are kept out of the decisionmaking part of the purchase process. That sounds like an internal management problem, in that the managers at your company aren't listening to the people in the trenches who will actually be working with it.
In my experience, scumbag marketers and salespeople are only successful when the people at the buying end suffer from overdeveloped credulity.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
I know of small busines CEOs/CIOs that look for specifics. Those that try to sell buzzwords don't get the sale, and salespersons with hardware/software knowledge have a decent chance. Often, though, the small-business IT staff will have found the optimum product(s) to solve the problem and already have the purchase order ready to sign as soon as the problem is diagnosed. That is true adaptability and flexibility in my humble opinion.
I also know of people who would make Dilbert's PHB look like a genius. I've seen one business with a division that was losing to a competitor in many areas, with their IT lag seriously hurting their situation. That business did not realize that their IT was causing a problem with customers, even though it was painfully obvious.
I have also met IT sales staff people who were reprimanded for giving specifics (such as cables, switches, routers, hubs, NICs, CDs, and licenses,) instead of using the term "solution" when presenting the cost estimate to the CIOs of companies who were interested in their product.
I think too many people have sat through too many marketing classes without learning anything, and this is the result. Sales people are instructed to sell a solution to a problem instead of the actual product, and a lot of CEOs and a few CIOs know they have a problem without knowing the cause, and just want a solution. Consequently, solutions have a higher margin than products, even if the product is exactly the same as the solution.
Or, I could be wrong, and PHBs are only a figment of Mr. Adam's imagination.
I have Watson's book on my shelf but am yet to read it all the way through.
I felt that the book, ironically enough, beat about the bush and took too long to make a simple point.
Check out how many car ads have semi-naked women running around in them, drooling at the sight of a man behind the steering wheel. Now, I'm the last person to object to semi-naked women, and under the right circumstances, I could probably take the drooling, but just what does this have to do with the product?
Right, nothing. Pure marketing. I'm sure the time will come when computers will be marketed with sex, too, but until then, keep in mind that we've still got it good.
And if there is anything that causes me not to recommend a product, it is being unable to find decent information on the web. You know, stuff like pricing, licensing conditions, technical capabilities, limitations, etc. Or even simply what a product is supposed to do for you!
Example: I never did find out what "Together/J" does, how much it costs, or even who makes it with any degree of certainty. The name is just too generic (try googling for it), and Borland (?) doesn't want you to know about it anyway. But it probably enables collabarative scalable enterprise solutions, or something... Oh, and I think it was using that kiss-of-death statement: "call for pricing details". In my mind that translates into "price has at least five digits", which is usually way too expensive. Besides, I want to make the initial investigation from the comfort of my desk, without picking up a trail of bloodsucking sales people calling me back twice a week to learn about my decision...
But really, too many companies make it too hard to learn about their products. Engineers _do_ read those pages, and _do_ make buying recommendations, and managers _DO_ listen to those!
It's not about dumbing things down for the geeks, it's about dumbing things down for the MBA's in the board room (you've seen the FedEx commercial??). They don't know a widget from a gizmo or a packet from a frame. Having techincal sounding words they can say and sort of understand makes them feel important. They are generally excluded from our circle and this makes them feel like they are "in" (even though we all know they'll NEVER be "in").
All you have to do is either price it be below their signature limit or make it sound good enough that the next guy up the chain, who has sufficient purchasing authority, will sign the PO.
When stuff like this actually starts making it to slashdot, we're doomed.
2 cents,
Queen B
HDGary secures my bank
The second big problem I'm seeing is: how the heck did we get to the point where CEOs/CIOs buy bullshit that sounds cool without asking someone who knows?
I mean, for example, let's take everyone's favourite comparison between computers and cars. So let's say a company, (A) produces cars, and (B) wants to make its own brand-new intranet system.
And here's the funny part:
(A) to make cars they actually trust the engineers what should go into that car. If the engineers say they need this and that gear or screw, that's what the company buys. I should hope the CEO doesn't come and say "nope, we just got this cool deal on ship propellers, so you have to use that in the cars from now on."
(B) to make the software, they proceed to thoroughly ignore and avoid the engineers, buy some bullshit from the biggest liar, and then blame the engineers and admins if it doesn't work.
It's dunno, like they're affraid to ask. It's like they'd get "STUPID" tattooed on their forehead if they ever asked a technical question, or accepted a recommendation from their own IT department.
In practice, most of us would actually respect them more.
I mean, dunno about others, but I don't expect a manager to be a Ph.D. in computers. But I do expect him to be good at his job: management. Which also includes delegating. Whatever he doesn't personally know, or isn't in his job description, his job is to find someone else who knows or can do that. That's what management is all about.
By contrast someone who just buys crap based on bullshit buzzwords rather than ever asking, is for me a sad clown. He just showed that he's incompetent at doing his own job: management.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I've come across situations where it's even worse than that - in the opposite direction. A large bank's technical department (usually quite rightly) drove the technical requirements of the department looking at our product.
But the technical department was completely confused between J2EE and EJBs. This confusion was communicated to the buying department and they then kept accusing us of not understanding J2EE. Our product was being written to J2EE 'standards' but we were not using EJBs.
Eventually, it dawned on me that both depts. thought J2EE meant EJBs. I then had to spend a lot of effort explaining why they did not need EJBs for this product. It didn't get through to the department looking at our product (it was probably too late by then anyway) and we lost the work (after many months...).
Did he inhale?
The "dunno what all those buzzwords mean, but we must have as many of them as possible" kind of mentality. Or as I like to call it: BDA (Buzzword Driven Architecture.)
They don't know what EJBs are (as illustrated by your example where they didn't know the difference between EJB and J2EE as a whole), but they've read in some IT-for-retards magazine that Sun says EJBs are great. So they must have some.
And for that matter, XML. And XSLT. (Just writing the data or using a template is soo 1990. Nowadays you _must_ have a small XSLT program which produces the output.) And SOAP. (Every internal call must be SOAP, you know. Just plain-old calling a C++ or Java method is soo outdated.) And have a scalable enterprise messaging framework. (Why just read stuff from a database, when you could send a SOAP message to an MDB to read it, and wait for the asynchronous response?)
And I've seen more perverse use of buzzwords which aren't even technical terms, but end up being wanted in the project anyway. E.g., "scalable". So you get a client explicitly wanting EJBs in their small web-app, because Sun said it's a scalable architecture. Uh, as opposed to what? As opposed to just using a load-balancer and a cluster, which also scales linearly?
Don't get me wrong, I'm not against EJB, XML, XSLT, JMS or SOAP as such. They have their uses. But like any tool, they're good for one class of problems. Just like you've said, there are plenty of problems which don't need EJB.
That is, until the client comes with a long list of buzzwords they absolutely must have...
Though to be entirely honest, _both_ sides are equally guilty in this. There are clueless PHBs who demand buzzwords, yes, but equally there are dishonest programmers using real projects just as a playground to get new buzzwords for their resume. A lot of projects which are just a sad collection of buzzwords, not because the boss wanted to have them, but because someone wanted those buzzwords on his resume.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.