Slashdot Mirror
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."
Apple would never do that, not with Xserves*
* Do not eat Xserve.
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...
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
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.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
Nice to see an article that thinks outside the box into new paradigms and synergies.
Corporations: your universal scapegoat for all society's ills.
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!
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.
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....
Advertisers and corporate relations departments produce bullshit... film at 11.
'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.
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!
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.
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.)
Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.
"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.
Table-ized A.I.
> without being sued... er... litigated against.
Don't you mean "without other companies leveraging their intellectual property at our expense" ?
The unofficial
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.
Trying to use sarcasm in text-based forums does not work.
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
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".
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.
Slashdot: Where nerds gather to pool their ignorance
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.
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
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...
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
"experiences, optimize agility or make people's passions come alive"
Sounds pretty much like sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll.
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.