Posted on 01/17/2005 5:55:31 AM PST by stainlessbanner
SEATTLE -- If Tim Schellhardt had one wish, it would be to eradicate the word "solution" from the technology industry, if not the entire English language.
"Solution" used to be a fine word. If you had a problem, you needed a solution.
But now, "It's used so much in the tech industry that it's lost its meaning," laments Schellhardt, the director of editorial services for the public relations firm Ketchum in New York.
These days, high-tech companies don't release products, they provide solutions. And those products - er, solutions - don't just run a program or play a song. Instead, they enable experiences, optimize agility or even sometimes make people's passions come alive.
Euphemism and allegory have always been common in business - where few get fired, but plenty get "downsized" - but some say the tongue-twisting technology industry has gone too far.
Alan Freedman, who has been writing technology encyclopedias for 25 years, realized things were really out of hand when people started asking him to decipher technology companies' own marketing materials - the stuff they allegedly use to entice people to buy their products. What's worse, he says, is that it sometimes took him months to wade through the buzzwords.
"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.
Anyone who's worked in the technology industry for long has their own personal list of pet peeves - although "solution" commonly tops the list.
When Fredric Paul first started hearing the word "enterprise," he wondered, were all these people "Star Trek" fans?
Years later, enterprise - that's high-tech speak for big company, not the big spaceship of "Star Trek" fame - is showing no signs of going away. And Paul, editor-in-chief of the Internet site TechWeb, has been dismayed to find that many other words he made fun of way back in 1999 are just as pervasive today.
Paul is still hoping to eradicate the word "scalable," which is fancy tech talk for something that can get bigger.
"My son is scalable, he's got built-in room to grow," he quips.
Other least favorites include "viral marketing" - meaning a marketing campaign that spreads at lightning speed - and "stickiness" - which refers to something that keeps a person interested in a Web page.
Taken together, he says, it sounds like a product that "requires a UN relief effort at this point."
Just how did all this tongue-twisting start? Tim Bajarin, a principal analyst with Creative Strategies, traces the origins back to the 1980s, when Microsoft Corp. and Apple Computer Inc. were struggling to make their computing products sound appealing to a largely tech-averse public.
Instead of saying that Microsoft's Office software would do boring tasks like compile data, he says Microsoft sought to sell it as a "solution" to workaday problems.
Bajarin also remembers Apple co-founder Steve Jobs promoting the "experience" of using an Apple computer way back in 1984 - before many people could see why they'd want one of these pricey, clunky boxes in their homes.
Two decades later, the word "experience" endures, as do the industry's attempts to humanize computing.
"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," Jim Allchin, Microsoft's top Windows executive, told hardware developers in a speech last May that was laden with the word.
Unfortunately, what began as an attempt to make computing sound familiar and appealing has too often resulted in making technology seem even more inpenetrable and confusing. Another problem is that buzzwords will sometimes take on a life of their own, with people repeating the phrase because it makes them sound like insiders, even if they aren't quite sure what the term means.
Some in the industry also say it's something their peers have come to expect.
Ryan Donovan, a Hewlett-Packard Co. public relations director, concedes that terms like "data migration" and "optimizes agility" - both of which have been found in his company's press materials - might be confusing to your average reader. But he says the company uses those phrases in documents intended for technology experts and executives who might be turned off by more plain-spoken wording.
"This is the language that they're comfortable with, and it's our job to make sure that we're speaking to them in a language that they understand," Donovan says.
Even tech buzzwords that have grown organically, rather than being coined by corporate marketing departments, have proven both tiresome and confusing. The word "blog" - a conjugation of "Web" and "log" that refers to online diaries - made Lake Superior State University's annual list of words that should be banished.
"Many who nominated it were unsure of the meaning," the list's authors noted. "Sounds like something your mother would slap you for saying."
But despite all the frustration, many doubt a return to less confusing wording.
"I don't see the buzzword craze stopping," says Brett Good, an executive with staffing firm Robert Half International, whose Accountemps unit recently did a study on annoying buzzwords. "In some ways, it's almost becoming filler, like 'um' or 'ah.' ... It's something that's just been built into the lexicon of American business."
techping
If you say "I want a scalable enterprise solution," does it mean you know what is going on...?
Yeah. You see, we're putting the coversheets on all TPS reports. If you could just go ahead and make sure you do that from now on, that would be great. Uh, I'll go ahead and make sure you get another copy of that memo, ok?
Don't forget "rich feature set." That grates me more than any of them, except maybe hearing "we need to take this offline" in a meeting. Some days, I really hate working in IT.
}:-)4
"Even tech buzzwords that have grown organically,"
organically..........now there is a work you can learn to hate. He is practicing the problem he is trying to get rid of. Or did the reporter use this word?
Let's start by eliminating the granddaddy of them all: the use of the word "technology" when one means "computer." It is not the "technology" industry, but the "computer" industry.
(This usage really started to bother me one day when a woman at a mid-sized company said to me, "We don't have an IS department, we have an IT department." WTF?)
Double plus ungood.
A guy in this video gets hammered for screwing up his TPS reports.
http://reebok.com.edgesuite.net/lastexit_terrys_world_dsl.wmv
Verbing wierds English.
Truer words have never been spoken ;-)
This isn't Riyhad!
What you said.
I nearly puke every time I hear "on-demand".
You wanna try on some "buzz words"...try the accounting field!
budget dust
coma factor
crittercam
early birding
Google politics
grid rage
life caching
maturialism
megadigm
munge
Olympic tourist
phonality
plog
potentialize
proceduralize
purple state
sailboat fuel
Sarbox
snowplows
sofa samurai
spamish
Stepford crowd
taxi moms
telepathetic
togethering
values
zerotasking
"We might be able to get there if we reconfigure the solar matrix in parallel for endothermic propulsion."
"Leverage" always grates on me, instead of simply stating "use".
I mean, it's not like Archimedes trying to move the world...
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