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."

Comments

Dumbing down product descriptions?

[danamania]

Apple would never do that, not with Xserves*

* Do not eat Xserve.

Re:Dumbing down product descriptions?

[ackthpt]

Apple would never do that, not with Xserves*

* Do not eat Xserve.

I see you have that First Post solution enhancing your lifestyle, congratulations.

Re:Dumbing down product descriptions?

[Anonymous Writer]

Actually, if you look at the bottom of the page on the iPod Shuffle, it says...

2. Do not eat iPod shuffle.

Solutions replaced products long ago

[Anonymous Coward]

Solutions replaced products long ago - at least 5 years, anyway. Were you in a hole in 1999 during the dot com IPO craze?

Re:Solutions replaced products long ago

[Sique]

I remember an advertisement selling "Your Problem - Our Solution" about 20 years ago. It was so abundant and the words "Your problem" and "Our solution" were aligned somewhat strange in the design, so we were always forced to read "Our Solution - Your Problem".

Re:Solutions replaced products long ago

[Sepper]

No matter which way you look at it, this thing called Our Solution constantly has to be subtracted from something to generate Profit.

Not quite. If we can convince your CEO that you have a problem, when you actually have none, then:

Our Solution = Profit

And THAT is 50% of why Buzzwords exists...

Need more buzzwords?

[IO ERROR]

My favorite: Web Economy Bullshit Generator
Dilbert-inspired: The Buzzword Generator
Yet Another Buzzword Generator

And there are many, many more buzzword generators out there, implemented using open-architected dynamic algorithms by organic radical policies...

Re:Need more buzzwords?

[The Hobo]

Two words:

Bullshit Bingo

Re:Need more buzzwords?

[britneys 9th husband]

I once heard of a company that used the following as their mission statement. You might as well just excerpt theirs. No kidding.

(company) leverages core skillsets and world-class team synergy through (product) to provide clients worldwide with robust, scalable, modern turnkey implementations of flexible, personalized, cutting-edge Internet-enabled e-business application product suite e-solution architectures that accelerate response to customer and real-world market demands and reliably adapt to evolving technology needs, seamlessly and efficiently integrating and synchronizing with their existing legacy infrastructure, enhancing the e-readiness capabilities of their e-commerce production environments across the enterprise while giving them a critical competitive advantage and taking them to the next level.

Re:Need more buzzwords?

[Greyfox]

I ported this from an unattributed VM REXX program dating back to 8/10/1982. The quoted mission statement could have been cut right from its output.

This is perl program, so just grab it down, read through it to make sure I don't rm -rf / and stuff, and have fun!

Foggy.txt

Dumbing down?

[mOoZik]

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.

Re:Dumbing down?

[Smidge204]

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=

Re:Dumbing down?

[Nefarious Wheel]

Yeah ... you sell the solution and let the little people work out the details.

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.

tech marketing words getting scrutiny

[Anonymous Coward]

Ryan Donovan, a Hewlett-Packard Co. public relations director, concedes that terms like "data migration" and "optimizes agility" - both of which are found in the company's press materials - might confuse average readers. But the company uses those phrases in documents intended for technology experts and executives, he says.

IBM...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:IBM...

[Monkelectric]

Microsoft learned most of their tricks from IBM, including FUD which was an IBM invention that Microsoft perfected. Microsoft in some ways is in the same situation as we are in the united states. They cant do *anything* without being critisized.

Not to say they are without blame -- I remember the pure horror the first time I used Visual Studio .NET and found that it opens not "Project" files like VS6 but "Solution" files.

For high end computing and low end computing

[BWJones]

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.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Don't blame this on Microsoft

[Dancin_Santa]

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.

Re:Don't blame this on Microsoft

[ScentCone]

This is the work of IBM and the rest of the "services" oriented consultants. KPMG, Anderson, etc. A group of highly paid morons.

Well, as one of those ... um, morons ... I can tell you that the folks you really want to blame are the folks who actually buy the IT and use it. If they had serious IT talent in house, or had their other process/business experts actually working with those folks - they wouldn't need all of us moronic consultants. Of course, the people who need their IT problems solved (um... hence the term "solution"), rarely have the clout to cause the in-house IT shop to be expanded, and even if they could, they'd chop those people right back off once most of the heavy lifting was done.

Anyway, as long as decent-sized firms need business problems solved with IT, somebody will have to do the work. To the extent that no in-house IT shop can keep the place running and handle large implementations of new tools, software, data, infrastructure... it's us morons to the rescue. And we have to live gig to gig, which means we're not getting paid for 40 solid hours of work every week of the year. We have to spend time finding new work, doing paperwork, and other things that make our actual customer-facing time as expensive as it is.

Incidentally, we don't use the term "solution" when we're talking about Excel or Word (well, not usually). That language comes out in the context of larger scale (and "scalable," yes) things we bolt together out of the higher-end products.

Now, I can't comment on which came first (IT's use of the term, vs what follows), but if you talk to the other operations people in a large company, you'll hear about "waste management solutions," "marketing solutions," "entryway security solutions," "fire supression solutions," and so on. Don't succumb to slashdot tunnel vision on this one!

Good article

[Killswitch1968]

Nice to see an article that thinks outside the box into new paradigms and synergies.

Not as good as you think

[Neoporcupine]

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!

Re:Not as good as you think

[BCW2]

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.

So what

[EmbeddedJanitor]

Engineers don't have the money and don't make the buying decisions, so there is no need to wrap products up in geek-appeal.

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.

Re:So what

[Guppy06]

"Engineers don't have the money and don't make the buying decisions,"

Yes they do, because today's world of scalable enterprise solutions everybody is an engineer! Just ask your local web engineer.

Re:So what

[EmbeddedJanitor]

Correct. The world is governed by bullshit.

First order of business for a CEO/CIO/board is to not make any decisions that will end up getting your ass fired.

Buying product that is dressed up with warm fuzzy sound-bites is appealing. Geek-talk sound very risky.

"Synergetic integration" sounds nice and sounds like a good decision.

"Client server system using a fibre optic backbone an V6 IP stacks" sounds pretty risky. When something goes wrong, the people that the decision makers report to (board/stock holders/...) will think the person took unnecessary risks, even if these descriptions are of exactly the same product/service.

Re:So what

[johannesg]

While this is true to a certain extent, at least where I work the engineers do check the products out before they are bought. I have been asked numerous times to evaluate specific products to find the one most suitable for a specific job or project. And true, I do not make the final decision, but I would have been very surprised if any of those hadn't gone with the recommended product.

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!

Bill Hicks Had It Right.

[colonslashslash]

"If any of you here are in advertising or marketing..... kill yourselves."

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 ;)

Re:Bill Hicks Had It Right.

[0x20]

...unless he can throw up bullets.

Re:Bill Hicks Had It Right.

[Lord_Dweomer]

This jealousy has to stop right here and now. As an advertising/marketing person, I have to say that you really have no idea what goes on in our world. While I can't say much for them factoring in their latest thinking outside the box scheme (which is what they get paid to do, and figuring out new ways to market the company that haven't been done before is actually a good thing believe it or not), I can easily see you don't see the purpose of our jobs.

While you think we're piddling around "doing lunch" and creating powerpoints, what you don't realize is that "doing lunch" lets us network and build relationships with sponsors and partners, which enables the company to get better prices, and get better deals with their marketing (saving money). The powerpoints, while a crutch to a true presentation, are often a convenient way to present new ideas to upper management, and a good way to get their approval to go ahead with the next campaign.

If you think marketing is useless, just recognize the fact that the product you so lovingly code wouldn't get out the door if it wasn't for marketing letting people know your product exists.

Remember, in any profession there are skilled people, and bullshitters, and that includes marketing/advertising. Thats fine if you want to pretend to be cool and hate us, but you don't know exactly what it is we do, and you should probably learn a bit about it before you go ahead and criticize us. Its not like we're sitting there saying all coders should kill themselves.

Come again?

[archnerd]

Ryan Donovan, a Hewlett-Packard Co. public relations director, concedes that terms like "data migration" and "optimizes agility" - both of which are found in the company's press materials - might confuse average readers. But the company uses those phrases in documents intended for technology experts and executives, he says.


To exactly which technology experts is he referring? Sure as hell not me.

Re:Come again?

[ScrewMaster]

I think the emphasis was on "executives", many of whom mistakenly consider themselves to be technology experts.

Newflash!

[TheOriginalRevdoc]

Advertisers and corporate relations departments produce bullshit... film at 11.

Solutions

[kevlar]

'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...

Just an old dog not wanting to learn new jargon...

[Jace of Fuse!]

After reading the article, I'd say he's basically bashing new jargon because he doesn't see a need for it.

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 ... uh... blah.

scalable is not a marketing word

[teromajusa]

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.

Opens up a good way to ...

[quax]

... 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.

Whiney bitch

[kevlar]

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!

Marketing is the root of the problem

[Soko]

"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

Dot Com pre-IPO Buzzword Primer

[Anonymous Coward]

Buzzword Translation
-------- -----------
Adaptable Product not yet coded.
Scalable Not scalable.
Best-of-Breed As good as other vaporware.
Zero-maintenance Zero-utility.
Open Works with anything - just not with your systems.

Re:Dot Com pre-IPO Buzzword Primer

[maxwell demon]

I think the translation is a bit different:

Adaptable: Works equally bad on every type of problem.
Scalable: Works equally bad on every problem size.
Best-of-breed: We tried several times, but couldn't produce something better.
Zero-maintenance: You can't make it work better by putting work into it.
Open: There are several ways to get our crap.
Cross-platform: Fails differently on different systems.
Future-proof: It can't get worse anyway.
Object-oriented: We expect someone to object against the use of this.
Patent-pending: Noone else will produce that sort of crap.
Integrated: We've put a lot of crap together to make a bigger product.

A Win/Win Proposition for Leveraging Strategic Com

[QuickFox]

A Win/Win Proposition for Leveraging Strategic Community Synergies

It is a well-known fact that at the current point in time unprecedented opportunities for leveraging win/win strategies arise through emergent social-dynamics synergies heralding revolutionary technology breakthroughs in world-wide media applications.

This post presents to the Slashdot community a proposal for an exciting new roadmap that delineates a win/win strategy integrating unique potentials for reaping the benefits of emergent synergistic effects arising from a major paradigm shift in focus group dynamics and from leveraging cost/benefit appraisals in the resulting market-share contribution matrix.

I think we can all agree that innovative win/win strategies to facilitate the on-going paradigm shifts in market model convergence scenario implementations spearheding cutting-edge technology utilization are paramount to the success of a comprehensive assessment of the emergent Slashdot win/win market penetration focus group convergence synergy potential.

This revolutionary proposal comprises a visionary win/win scenario for leveraging factors that consume all resources, in other words, resource hogs. The new strategy implements enhanced information flows wherein the resultant rise in information flow constitutes a major asset in the win/win strategy for enhancing countermeasures against this particular type of resource-consuming factor, in that the resultant friction will wash them away.

This unique win/win/win scenario comprises state-of-the-art paradigm shifts in community-building strategies for leveraging burgeoning cutting-edge visions of innovative synergized implementation models that underscore the win/win/win/win potentials of a comprehensive market-share focus to facilitate the sustainable spearheading of integrated emergent convergence-orientated industry exposures utilizing win/win/win/win/win propositions for heralding the introduction of unprecedented new win/win/win/win/win/win technology cost/benefit appraisals in order to enhance your browsing experience.

(If you read this post very carefully, you'll notice that if you remove all the buzzwords, what remains is hogwash. Literally.)

Confused? Just read....

[Tablizer]

"XML Enterprise Object Network Services 101 with UML in Seven Days for Dummies Super-Bible Unleashed"

I read it and am now all cleared up. It even removed nasal congestion under 2 minutes and left my nose smelling minty clean with a mild scent of fresh lemon.

It's more about marketing

[jesterzog]

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.

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.

Re:It's more about marketing

[Fnkmaster]

Customer: "Hi, I walked by, and I was thinking I'm really in need of a dynamic solution..."

Salesman: "Well great! You've come to the right place! We have all sorts of dynamic solutions here!"

Huh? Apple?

[Titusdot Groan]

Why is this bozo blaming enterprise buzzword bingo on Apple?

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?

Re:IP laws.

[Gherald]

> without being sued... er... litigated against.

Don't you mean "without other companies leveraging their intellectual property at our expense" ?

Buzzwords...

[Thunderstruck]

I've got your slashdot buzzwords right here in one handy, easy to remember phrase:

In Soviet Russia, all your base are imagining an ad-hoc beowulf cluster of old korean overlords welcoming YOU!

Thank you.

communications issues

[Doc Ruby]

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?

Bill Gates or Timothy Leary

[Performaman]

"Today the PC is often still considered just a tool, but together we need to make it a lot more than that. We need to make it a path to experiences,"
Replace "the PC is" with "drugs are."

Need Translations?

[DaveAtFraud]

Try The Buzzword Compliant Dictionary. Sadly, Bullfighter is no longer available.

Don Watson's Death Sentence

[Anthony]

I read his book a few months ago. He talks of the death of public language, how it has been pervaded by words and phrases that have no real power or truth - dead language.

To quote from the following article Fighting the Death Sentence

"To provide outcome-related research and consultancy services that address real-world issues" - shrieks of laughter. The university's "approach to quality management is underpinned by a strong commitment to continuous improvement and a whole-of-organisation framework" - uproar in the room. The university in question was RMIT but it could have been any of them. Go to your website and read the language, Watson urged guests at a recent Deans of Education dinner. That made people laugh even more. They worked at universities; they knew what he was talking about. Some of them probably even wrote this stuff. It was a surreal moment. But to Watson the joke has a sting. It is funny and it is awful. A terrible thing is happening to the language, he believes, and at the end of the day, in a globalised world, it is not a positive communications outcome. In other words, there is a pox upon our public speech.

Re:Don Watson's Death Sentence

[lpontiac]

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.

Solutions are the problem

[topham]

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.

Obfuscational Rhetoric

[WeirdKid]

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.

Re:A Win/Win Proposition for Leveraging Strategic

[mlk]

(If you read this post very carefully, you'll notice that if you remove all the buzzwords, what remains is hogwash. Literally.)

I did try, but when the blood start to dripping from my ear, I gave up.

Blame the marketers, not the engineers

[catwh0re]

Engineers are fine calling things A#2343VF or build no. 86.33.059A.

Unfortunately those don't sell.
Marketers on the other hand begin with their job title, "I'm a human to product relationship consultant, my work load is scalable while energising each new solution. etc etc"

It is marketing

[fermion]

And any reasonable person who takes it seriously get what they deserve. It is reducing the rating of the computers perfomance, or even the cars performanace, to a single number. It is invoking the 'single vendor', either as a good or bad thing, to sell MS products. We do not buy furniture, we buy a lifestyle. We do not buy beer, we buy a dudes night out. We show our love not through the daily attention paid to another person, but through the size of diamond or a security system or, as a base, the amount of money we are able to accumulate.

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.

Marketing is necessary

[Infonaut]

Marketing is lies, more lies and damned lies in a pretty package so you'll put your money and reputation on the line.

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.

Re:Marketing is necessary

[Infonaut]

marketing however should not be lying about what your product does.

Of course marketers shouldn't lie. Usually they don't. Instead, they use broad, vague terms that can seldom be disproven. "Well, when we said our product could integrate with Snaftech System 3000 servers, we were correct. You need the Goatbleat 150 Converter in order to obtain full functionality, but you can still connect to the Snaftech 3000 using our product. It all depends on how you define the word 'integrate' I guess."

As the world becomes more complex, it becomes more and more difficult for marketers (who are supposed to sell product) to get people to get people to understand what their product does before they move on to the next product. Potential customers present a limited window of opportunity.

One way to deal with this is to take the straight-shooter approach. You don't overstate what your product can do, and you consciously set realistic expectations. Companies that operate in this fashion are almost always a surprise, because they seem so rare these days.

The other approach is to come as close to lying as possible without doing so in an overt fashion.

If someone's job is to get you to buy a product, marketing and sales people who operate in a freewheeling, "just sell the damn things" environment will bend the truth wherever they can. Ultimately in my experience, the culture in the marketing department is a *direct* reflection of the example provided by the executive team. If they want results at any cost, principled marketing and sales people will be weeded out.

[soapbox] So many public companies operate this way because they've been conditioned to do so by the Cult of Shareholder Value, which states that as long as the company is making money in the short term, (i.e. - rewarding shareholders) then the company is doing well. Hardly anyone things about the effect of their decisions beyond the current fiscal quarter. The result is the continuing decline of integrity.[/soapbox]

Re:Every software is scalable.

[mwa]

It may be a buzzword, but it is also a legitimate feature.

"Scalability" is a pure and meaningless buzzword, unless specific metrics of the precise scale is provided. That's the point.

We have a "scalable" application that scales by adding servers and dividing the work between them. That's not so bad in and of itself except that in order to get the information you want out of it you have to know which server to ask and none of the servers can tell you anything about the big picture.

Scales great and "less filling" too!

Re:My favorite is 'leverage'

[jonadab]

Ah, but what do you want to leverage? Why, solutions, of course. What kind
of solutions? Enterprise solutions, obviously. And why do you want to
leverage these enterprise solutions? In order to set the company on
a critical path to achieve total quality, monetize the bottom line, and
raise the bar and set the standard for the entire industry, of course. Ah,
but here's the real question: *how* do you leverage the enterprise solutions
and set the company on a critical path to do those things? You need a
gameplan, a gameplan to get everyone on the same page going forward in a
fault-tollerant and robust expectations paradigm, that's how, because only
with that kind of dynamic will you really out-compete the competition in the
new ecconomy. So, we need to revisit our objectives and reorient our goals
so that we -- all of us -- can accomplish this vision, this future, indeed,
this destiny. Everyone has to participate in the process, because you can't
meet the kits if you don't go to St. Ives...

The word "synergy"

[Linknoid]

I don't know if the people using synergy actually know what it means, but I'm sick of people on Slashdot treating it as if it's a word without meaning. When two things are synergistic, it means that they produce greater results working together than the combination would seperately. For example, there's a synergy between zinc and vitamin E. If you take either one alone, you won't get the benefit you would if you take both together.

Re:The word "synergy"

[Jerf]

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.

Why "solutions" rather than concrete technology

[dbrower]

A "solution" sale leads one to higher "value based pricing", where a technology sale leads one to "cost based pricing".

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

I've seen this go both ways.

[wasted]

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.

Re:I've seen this go both ways.

[Anonymous Coward]

"I know of small busines CEOs/CIOs that look for specifics."

This just in: it is possible to post to Slashdot from parallel dimensions.

"I also know of people who would make Dilbert's PHB look like a genius."

That sounds more like MY universe...

"Sales people are instructed to sell a solution to a problem instead of the actual product..."

Actually (and I'm not trying to be funny here, not that I succeeded earlier) a good sales person is supposed to sell a solution to a problem rather than just a product. The problem is sales people who view one product as the only solution, rather than explore a range of possibilities and find the optimal price/function point that best suits the customer, since they tend to exploit the ignorance of non-technical managerial types.

But this isn't just limited to sales vermin!

Take all the geeks who push Linux here on /.: some user just want to open the box, plug it in, switch it on and get going without having to make thousands of choices or research which distro is the "best". Then there's the Windows fanboys: you might find it easy installing anti-virus and anti-spyware software, configuring firewalls, etc, but some people don't want all that (see the recent article about people "giving up" on the internet). And of course Mac nut-jobs aren't any different: some people like being able to tweak their hardware, configure the OS to their taste, play all the latest games, and so on.*

The message here is "horses for courses"; don't assume that you know what someone wants better than they do (even if they wouldn't know a CPU from a seeping ewe), don't let bias cloud recommendations. Advocate, yes, but glossing over any difficulties a given user might face, or ignoring the basic reason someone has for making a purchase is irresponsible, whether on a personal or professional level.

*Disclaimer: I'm a Mac nut-job. That doesn't mean I can't see potential problems for others with Macs, just that none of those problems matter to me.

Legal 101....

[Duncan3]

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.

Re:Just an old dog not wanting to learn new jargon

[Spoing]

1. I would say most of what he sites is pretty silly, but "Scalable?"

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.

Re:Every software is scalable.

[Spoing]

1. "Scalability" is a pure and meaningless buzzword, unless specific metrics of the precise scale is provided. That's the point.

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.

Compared to what, car companies?

[Nice2Cats]

This has nothing to do with computers and everything to do with marketing. In fact, computer marketing is still pretty cerebral compared to what car builders do: Stupid films with their products ripping up the lane markers, stupid films with their pickup trucks getting loaded up to the brim with more rocks than will fit in the average garden...

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.

Re:Every software is scalable.

[Spoing]

Note that I am talking *only* about multi-user or multi-process systems.

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.

Re:Reminds me of .Net

[jjohnson]

It was supposed to be several things:

1. A language neutral virtual machine that allows developers to code in their language of choice.
2. A standard library covering everything you'd need, especially for hiding the Win32 API.
3. A collection of software written to the VM and the standard library that, in virtue of that standardization, would allow for greater interoperability and integration (taking advantage of things like binary compatibility for basic datatypes, for example).
4. A framework like Passport on steroids that would unify authentication and authorization and data storage over the network (AKA Hailstorm).

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.

Examples?

[Spy der Mann]

"experiences, optimize agility or make people's passions come alive"

Sounds pretty much like sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll.

My favorite solution

[techno-vampire]

Caffine dissolved in water.

Literally??

[khellendros1984]

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'.

Microsoft's leaflet.

[Vo0k]

I remember a slogan from Microsoft's leaflet.

(some MS product) makes your work interesting.

Note: Not more efficient. Not easier. Not faster. Not higher quality. Not less tiring.
Exactly: "interesting". As in "WTF? Who would expect that option THERE?!" "Uh.... Not quite what I wanted, but interesting nevertheless". "And what does the picture on THAT icon mean?" "Maybe THIS option will do what I want? No? Maybe this one then?"
It was really interesting to follow an official Microsoft's troubleshooting guide on some problem, some 60 steps like "open this, click that, select this, scroll down to that, doubleclick this, rightclick that and pick option n, then press button X" only to realize around step 40 that there's no button X where it was supposed to be according to the guide.
Not really efficient. Rather annoying. Completely futile. But interesting nevertheless.

Red Herring Strikes Again

[queenb**ch]

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

Problem #1

[Moraelin]

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.

Re:Problem #1

[KontinMonet]

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...).

Problem #2

[Moraelin]

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.

Well, _I_ hate the _system_ that created you

[Moraelin]

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.

That would be "Problem #3", yes

[Moraelin]

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.

appealing to non-tech-savvy audiences

[buss_error]

Technical decisions are so much easier without any technicial people involved. (Dilbert)