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Sun Microsystems IT

Is "Marketingspeak" Killing Technology? 487

Posted by Hemos from the the-death-of-communication dept.
An anonymous reader writes "In this essay titled, inevitably, "SUNset?" an analogy is drawn between the car industry in Detroit, which failed in the 70s because the execs looked out their windows and saw nothing but American cars and so missed completely the threat from Japanese companies, and Sun Microsystems. "Sun is going to fail in this decade if it does nothing but send out surveys to customers asking them to validate marketing phrases of Sun's creation," says the author. He adds: "If you are someone who never gets tired of hearing 'proven,' 'best-of-breed,' 'cost-effective,' or 'taking the surprise out of business solutions,' then contact Sun and demand as much of their current marketing material as they can muster." But it isn't just Sun, surely. This is a failing of technology marketeers in general. Hmm, doubtless we can all come up with our own examples far equally awful as these from Sun. Who can come up with worse?"
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Is "Marketingspeak" Killing Technology? More

Is "Marketingspeak" Killing Technology?

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  • fuk yeah. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by torpor ( 458 ) <ibisumNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Monday September 20, 2004 @12:13PM (#10298874) Homepage Journal

    the creation of incoherent language was the first technology. its been downhill since then.

  • Worse? (Score:5, Funny)

    by savagedome ( 742194 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @12:14PM (#10298881)
    Who can come up with worse?

    This thread is quickly going to be "That's nothing. This one time..."

  • Mature industry (Score:5, Insightful)

    by pradeepsekar ( 793666 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @12:14PM (#10298883)
    Are these signs of a mature industry which is in need of a disruptive change in the market to shake it up?

    • Re:Mature industry (Score:5, Funny)

      by dcphoenix ( 528517 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @12:22PM (#10298965)
      Only if we follow through by creating a whole new paradigm (sp?) in which employees are empowered to leverage their abilities and thus work smarter, not harder.

      • Re:Mature industry (Score:5, Funny)

        by infinite9 ( 319274 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @12:51PM (#10299283)
        I was given this by a coworker during a project being run by andersen consulting (now accenture). In my opinion, they are the masters of this kind of bullshit, the the following joke about chickens crossing the road. Appologies to the (unknown to me) author:

        Deregulation of the chicken's side of the road was threatening its dominant market position. The chicken was faced with significant challenges to create and develop the competencies required for the newly competitive market. Accenture, in a partnering relationship with the client, helped the chicken by rethinking its physical distribution strategy and implementation processes. Using the Poultry Integration Model (PIM), Andersen helped the chicken use its skills, methodologies, knowledge, capital and experiences to align the chicken's people, processes and technology in support of its overall strategy within a Program Management framework.

        Accenture convened a diverse cross-spectrum of road analysts and best chickens along with Accenture consultants with deep skills in the transportation industry to engage in a two-day itinerary of meetings in order to leverage their personal knowledge management, both tacit and explicit, and to enable them to synergize with each other in order to achieve the implicit goals of delivering and successfully architecting and implementing an enterprise-wide value framework across the continuum of poultry cross-median processes. The meeting was held in a park-like setting, enabling and creating an impactful environment which was strategically based, industry-focused, and built upon a consistent, clear, and unified market message and aligned with the chicken's mission, vision and core values. This was conducive towards the creation of a total business integration solution.
        Accenture helped the chicken change to become more successful.

        • Re:Mature industry (Score:5, Funny)

          by jafomatic ( 738417 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @01:08PM (#10299469) Homepage
          This looks good, but change all uses of "helped," to "facilitated."

          Thanks, and make sure to carbon each VP and appropriate secretaries.

          • Re:Mature industry (Score:4, Funny)

            by upside ( 574799 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @01:24PM (#10299639) Journal
            Excellent. Also, swap "change" for "transition".
        • ...creating an impactful environment...

          I'd think the last thing you'd want when architecting a road crossing would be an impactful environment...

        • Re:Mature industry (Score:5, Interesting)

          by VendettaMF ( 629699 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @01:30PM (#10299717) Homepage
          *waves*
          Current Accenture code drone here. Just for the record, any employee of Accenture who includes the name "Andersen" (or even "Anderson") interchangeably in any communication internally or externally like you just did ("...Andersen helped the chicken use...") can expect a visit from the internal newspeak police at best, and (far more commonly) hideous termination (refer to tome IV of the employee contract for details) on surprisingly short notice...

        • Problem: People with no technical knowledge (Score:4, Insightful)

          by Futurepower(R) ( 558542 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @04:08PM (#10301547) Homepage

          There is a huge problem with people working in a technological company who have no interest in or knowledge of technology. Not only do they feel pressured to lie when they don't know what they are doing, they can't always detect when they are lying. They become robot liars representing their company.

          This kind of thing affects more than the technology industry. It's only natural that people who work in companies that pretend to be sane would vote for a president who pretends to be sane.

          --
          Bush: Spending money the U.S. doesn't have [brillig.com] to make himself look good.

      • Re:Mature industry (Score:4, Funny)

        by jonadab ( 583620 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @02:04PM (#10300117) Homepage Journal
        So basically you're saying that we need to follow up our action opportunity
        by revisiting our objectives and re-orienting our goals according to an
        open-source mindset so that we can pro-actively leverage agglutinative team
        dynamics and team-building best practices to create bottom-up holistic synergy
        through the empowerment and integration of key team players on the front lines
        of our sales and production demographics into our prioritized mind share, so
        as to focus everyone on the same page going forward in a fault-tolerant,
        results-driven, and robust expectations paradigm that will initiate strategic
        core competencies in our interpersonal assets management, foster win-win
        outside-the-box thinking in our targeted skill-set networking and group-to-group
        issues collaboration ecosystem, set us on a critical path to achieve total
        quality in our quality-driven, services-oriented resources management game
        plan, monetize the reusability of our top-down multitasking approach, and
        up-sell the competition in the new economy.
        • Wow, I don't know if you're joking or not with thispagraph, but I'm going to print it out and have it in my notebook thingy I use for meetings. If I ever get caught sleeping (again), I will just read what I see first. Thanks!

    • Hey, that's pretty insightful... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by StressGuy ( 472374 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @12:28PM (#10299026)
      could you imagine a Beowulf cluster of thinkers like this in Soviet Russia - where the industry changes you?

      Yea, I know, I should have just shut up and modded the parent post as funny. It will be interesting to watch though, the parent smacks of a funny post that is in danger of being modded insightful.

    • Don't sink to their level (Score:5, Insightful)

      by StCredZero ( 169093 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @12:41PM (#10299176)
      Deciding if marketing-speak is BS based on buzzword matching/frequency counting is just sinking to their level. It's as devoid of semantics and real thought as buzzword matching to do hiring. After all, there's always a marketing/engineering disconnect, so this will likely tell you zilch about the technology.

      If you want to evaluate a technology, evaluate the technology -- ignore all of the marketing. Be empirical. Actually play with the technology. If they won't let you get your hands on it, then be suspicious.

      Responding to the original post, that's right if you define "maturity" for an industry to mean "the point at which a significant fraction of those involved don't understand what they're saying and just pass along marketspeak like neurons in a big brain processing signals."
      • I so agree. And I'll add on that marketing technology will always be a challenge from the job description perspective. A car marketing person can be expected to drive their product around. I can't expect a sun marketing person to try out solaris. That's the flaw with marketing in general. The more complicated the technology, the less the marketing person touches.

  • Marketing (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 20, 2004 @12:15PM (#10298892)
    Will never understand Technology.

    I find in every place I've worked that Marketing and Technology NEVER can agree on anything, so why should Sun be any different?

    • Re:Marketing (Score:5, Insightful)

      by jimfulton ( 204820 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @12:31PM (#10299075)

      [Marketing] Will never understand Technology.

      Only for poor marketers and poor technologists.


      Good technology marketers often start out as as engineers who find they have a passion for evangelizing their creations. Similarly, the best technologists make the biggest impact on the world often because they are able to get people to immediately understand the value of what they create.


      The "field of dreams" approach usually ends up giving you a pile of dirt covered with weeds.

    • Conversely... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by dasmegabyte ( 267018 )
      Technology will never understand Marketing. The two are different concepts with different goals. Marketing's goal is to attract the people who spend the money and make the big overall decisions to their technology. Technology's goal is to explain itself to the people who have to implement it.

      Unfortunately, many technology leaders think Marketing is just cunning language and empty promises. So when they make a terribly useful technology, they fail to explain it and instead spin a picture of what it COUL

      • Re:Conversely... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Lost Race ( 681080 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @04:37PM (#10301883)
        The Linux kernel, and various Apache projects, and open source / free software projects in general, are not marketable products, they are raw materials from which marketable products can be constructed. Those products (e.g. Red Hat Linux) are the things that need marketing to make sales, and have enough potential sales revenue to justify marketing.

        Where is the Apache marketing budget going to come from? Why does Apache need marketing? To make more "sales"? The software is available for free download! They make no money on "sales"! It seems to me all the Apache projects need is developers, specifically competent developers expert in fields related to the various projects. So those cryptic, obtuse Apache web pages are actually spot on for their purpose, which is to get more developers (who know and understand the issues already, newbies need not apply) involved in the projects.

        (To get a real visceral understanding of the difference between "open source project" and "marketable product", try downloading MythTV and setting yourself up a PVR; then try buying a Tivo and plugging it in. I say this not to cast aspersions on the MythTV project -- I am a dedicated hardcore MythTV user and will probably never buy a Tivo -- but to highlight the fact that MythTV is all about TV-recording technology, while Tivo is all about recording TV. Which one needs marketing? The one that records TV, not the one that provides interesting technology.)

    • Re:Marketing (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Waffle Iron ( 339739 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @01:14PM (#10299514)
      A tiny minority of marketing people do understand technology. Over the decades, I've been involved with or close to just a couple of wildly successful projects. Each of these had highly talented marketing people who thoroughly understood both the market and how the products themselves worked in detail. Many of these people were ex-engineers themselves. (Usually they weren't "natural" engineers, but they were smart enough to get an engineering degree from a decent school, after which they realized that suitdom was their true calling in life).

      One of the keys to a successful engineering career is finding companies and projects with to-notch marketing and management teams. This is very difficult because of the extreme rarity of such situations. When you're doing job interviews or looking for new projects within a company, one of the best skills you can have is judging who is truly a talented product manager or marketeer, and who is just a bullshitter.

      Like it or not, you have to form a symbiotic relationship with marketing, management and production people to make an impact in engineering. If any part of the whole is below par, the whole effort is likely to fail. However, once in a while all of the contributors are competent, and those are the cases where you'll probably find the most success.

  • I will reply shortly (Score:5, Funny)

    by Timesprout ( 579035 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @12:15PM (#10298898)
    Currently I am proactively generating a synergistic environment where I can bring to fruition a new paradigm in answering questions of this nature.

  • Those words mean what you think they mean (Score:5, Funny)

    by staaarship ( 513701 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @12:15PM (#10298900)
    "far equally awful"?


    That's unpossible!

  • All I Know (Score:5, Insightful)

    by The-Bus ( 138060 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @12:17PM (#10298911)
    is that this is the only time [amazon.com] I want to see the word "synchronicity" being used.

    • Re:All I Know (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Bozdune ( 68800 )
      Right, but one has to feel sorry for the marketing drone who has to interview a bunch of nerds and figure out what the hell they've built. I've seen a lot worse than "synchronicity."

      Part of the blame is ours. Oftimes we don't take the time to educate the marketing people properly, and then we're "surprised" at the nonsense they generate. And, how many times have we code-named the new product something silly and funny, and then the marketing people have to come up with the "real" name? Talk about pass t

  • Bullshit Detectors, ACTIVATE (Score:3, Funny)

    by YetAnotherName ( 168064 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @12:17PM (#10298912) Homepage
    People might find handy the equation posted in this comment [slashdot.org].

  • Got edge? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 20, 2004 @12:17PM (#10298914)
    I've been reaching for the bleeding edge of technology for so long, my fingers really hurt now...

  • Working at a Marketing company (Score:4, Interesting)

    by HackHackBoom ( 198866 ) * on Monday September 20, 2004 @12:18PM (#10298917) Journal
    We have a finely tuned bullshitometer here: My wife. She is so synical and sick and tired of the horsedung put out by marketers nowadays that I'm pretty conifident if I can get past her.
    • My wife, OTOH, buys into bull too easily. I had HD cAble installed (while I run the structured cabling for satellite), and the installer was arguing that there is no "burn in" danger with letterboxed material on 4:3 sets. I said, "If you are so sure, but a note to that effect on the work order you'll ask me to sign and leave me a copy." Of course, he didn't, but my wife complained that I was being "difficult".

  • ColorStream (Score:5, Insightful)

    by renehollan ( 138013 ) <{ten.eriwraelc} {ta} {nallohr}> on Monday September 20, 2004 @12:18PM (#10298919) Homepage Journal
    Several years ago, I went looking for a new television, which was HD Ready. At the time, this meant having analog component video inputs: YPbPr and capable of accepting 720P and/or 1080i signals. There was no DVI (with HDCP), yet.

    So, I go into this store, and I ask about such TVs, and all the sales droids yammer on about Sony with "ColorStream!"

    WTF is ColorStream? Does that mean component video inputs, i.e. YPbPr that support 720P and 1080i inputs? "No," sales droid says, "ColorStream" gives you a better picture.

    It was only by requesting the manual for the set in which I was interested, that I could verify that ColorStream meant YPbPr. And even then, I had do refer to the specification summary page.

    I'm sure that many lost sales happen because some sales doofus doesn't know that the product they're flogging actually meets the customer's needs perfectly!

    • Re:ColorStream (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Astadar ( 591470 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @12:27PM (#10299012)
      I bet more sales are made because people are impressed by "Now, with ColorStream!"

      Now THERE's the root of the problem.

    • Re:ColorStream (Score:5, Insightful)

      by lukewarmfusion ( 726141 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @12:30PM (#10299058) Homepage Journal
      "I'm sure that many lost sales happen because some sales doofus doesn't know that the product they're flogging actually meets the customer's needs perfectly!"

      That's only if the customer actually knows their needs. Half the time the customer doesn't know what they need and will rely on the salesperson to tell them what they need. The other half (almost) the customers thinks they know what they need and will let the salesperson convince them that what they sell is what they need.

      The thing is, almost every salesperson will approach it from the viewpoint that what they're selling is exactly what the customer should buy. That's why you see people walk out of Best Buy with the wrong thing for the wrong system, all at the wrong price.

      • Re:ColorStream (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Gyorg_Lavode ( 520114 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @01:31PM (#10299723)
        I used to sell computers. Being knowledgable for a long time I tried to just inform the consumer about the computers and let them pick what fit them. I quickly found out that was way too much for them. So I went to offering them 2 computers based on what they told me. I'd say, "if you want your sun to be able to play games or you feel you may want to edit video and movies, I suggest you get this more expensive one. If you are only going to work on documents and surf the web, then you probably will be fine spending less money and getting this one". And you know what? 90% of customers would leave completely confused about what they should buy. They wanted someone to say, "buy this computer" w/o any reason to. Or maybe something like, "it's got colorstream for better quality picture!" but they couldn't give 2 shits about the technology they were actually getting or what it was truely capable of and suited for.

    • Re:ColorStream (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Retric ( 704075 )
      My problem with market speak is it get's dated vary quickly. I know what max rez 1600x1200@85hz is and what going to 1600x1200@100hz does but WTF dos XVGA mean and is it better or worse than SVGA?

      Is that geforce 4 MX better or worse than a geforece 3? (worse) How about Radion 9800 vs X800?

      Now with CPU's we got a simple number that has some meaning within a product line 3.0Ghz vs 3.2Ghz? But what do I do when I want to pick up a TV? I now have HD vs non HD, projection vs flat screen, analog vs Digital, 7

  • Example (Score:5, Funny)

    by Monokeros ( 200892 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @12:18PM (#10298921)
    See the third line of this quote:
    Conveniently located in the heart of Palmyra Atoll, eProvisia LLC is the leading provider of reliable, robust, powerful and cost-efficient spam filtering solutions for world-class corporations and individual users.


    Privately funded in 1993, now with customers in 40 countries* and over $67 million** in cash reserves, the company experienced a phenomenal growth and continues to aggressively pursue new frontiers in order to meet or exceed the needs of most demanding customers by providing a scalable, seamless, comprehensive offering.

    Leveraging our paradigm-shifting product line with state of the art technology developed by a dedicated team of professionals, we offer a significant competitive advantage on the diversified but fragmented market of best of breed anti-spam solutions.
    * - Not all currently recognized by UN. ** - Palmyra Atoll dollars.


    --from earlier today [slashdot.org].

  • Deja vu? (Score:4, Funny)

    by sunderland56 ( 621843 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @12:18PM (#10298923)
    "Sun is going to fail in this decade if ...."

    Uh.... didn't Sun fail last decade??

  • outsource this ! (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Shouldn't marketing be commoditizied and outsourced live American workers were? I mean, what's so special about glossy brochures with models and focus groups?

  • "marketingspeak" doesn't determine decisions (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ViolentGreen ( 704134 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @12:18PM (#10298925)
    It's jargon and buzzwords and nothing more. All companies do that. Nobody buys products based on that. Any company looking at sun will look past the "marketingspeak" and look at the product.

    • Re:"marketingspeak" doesn't determine decisions (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Kainaw ( 676073 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @12:30PM (#10299061) Homepage Journal
      It's jargon and buzzwords and nothing more.

      That is mostly correct. Decision makers do get deaf to words they hear too much. But, tech marketing is also a numbers (or versions) game. For instance, is Company A's Superpro 1700 better than Company B's Megapro 1600? The people making decisions don't know what the numbers mean. That marketing hype is in all areas of hardware from the computers to video cards and monitors (my 19" LCD has a screen that is actually 17" - but the casing is 19"). It is also in software - just look at IE and Netscape's version jockying in the past.

  • "Solution" and "rich" do it for me (Score:4, Insightful)

    by sphealey ( 2855 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @12:19PM (#10298929)
    Any technology pitch with the words "solution", "rich", or "exciting" and I automatically check to see if my pocket has been picked. "Rich" - now that's rich!

    sPh

  • Is this new? Is this news? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Ars-Fartsica ( 166957 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @12:20PM (#10298946)
    Come on, people have been hawking "scalable enterprise empowerment" or "veritcally integrated open groupware" or "user-centric frameworks for collaboration" for a decade.

  • I followed the "Awful" examples link (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Trolling4Dollars ( 627073 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @12:21PM (#10298954) Journal
    And I found this:


    First, run the "BS Detector" (www.streettech.com/bs) over your website to check for marketing-speak. Then deploy and action these tips:


    Convert your online visitors into customers by inviting them to act. Every page should have a clear call to action to get your visitors to take the next step.


    Cut to the chase. People scan web pages, they don't read them, and they read at least 30% slower off the screen than off paper. Use active verbs rather than passive ones. It saves words and is more persuasive.


    Note all the bolded text in the snippet above. Is this an inside joke? Look at all the BS in those sentences! ;P

    • Then deploy and action these tips

      Calvin: I like to verb words.

      Hobbes: What?

      Calvin: I take nouns and adjectives and use them as verbs. Remember when "access" was a thing? Now, it's something you do. It got verbed. Verbing weirds language.

      Hobbes: Maybe we can eventually make language a complete impediment to understanding.

  • Companies that don't make (or don't continue to make) good stuff will get their lunch eaten by those who do. That's how the world works, and anyone with the historical perspective of a teenager should realize that "marketingspeak" may kill a company but it won't "kill technology".

    Honestly, this one wasn't even worth jumping to a readable slashdot.org domain...

    • Companies that don't make (or don't continue to make) good stuff will get their lunch eaten by those who do.

      So, Novell is eating Microsoft's lunch?

      Maybe Novell decided it didn't like the sardine and limburger sandwich it found in Bill's bag...

  • Customers (Score:4, Insightful)

    by pete-classic ( 75983 ) <hutnick@gmail.com> on Monday September 20, 2004 @12:23PM (#10298976) Homepage Journal
    The market delivers what customers want.

    My theory is that the problem, if there is one, is that MBAs are making too many of the technical decisions. (I.e. "Which mail server should we use? Why, Exchange, of course!")

    As long as the real customer is a non-technical person, technological products will be marketed this way.

    -Peter

    • Re:Customers (Score:5, Insightful)

      by maxpublic ( 450413 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @01:42PM (#10299840) Homepage
      The market delivers what customers want.

      Often the case is that the market defines what the customer wants, then convinces the customer that the 'want' in question was their own idea in the first place.

      It's the only way I can explain prime-time TV.

      Max

  • "Industry/Market Leading","IndustryStandard" (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Dr.Dubious DDQ ( 11968 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @12:24PM (#10298986) Homepage

    As far as I can tell, "Industry Leading" just means "has a marketing department." (Ditto for "Market Leading").

    "Industry Standard" doesn't actually mean what it says, either. These days it just means "We think lots of people do things this way, or at least claim that we think that."

  • Catbert stikes again! (Score:5, Funny)

    by sup4hleet ( 444456 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @12:24PM (#10298990) Homepage
    This has been around for a while (since 2000 I think), but I still get a laugh out of it:

    Catbert's Mission statement generator [dilbert.com]

    Perfect for this thread!

    • It works! It really works! (Score:5, Funny)

      by ClayJar ( 126217 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @01:20PM (#10299583) Homepage
      I have a friend whose company was bidding on a contract. Part of the forms they had to fill out was their company's mission statement. Well, since they didn't have a mission statement, and since it was a *required* field on the form, he went to Dilbert.com and fetched one of these lovely (*cough*) mission statements.

      They got the contract, in part because the client thought they had a good mission statement. (Needless to say, they never told the client where they came up with it.)

  • My personal favorite (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Weaselmancer ( 533834 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @12:28PM (#10299027)

    Is mission critical. It's a seriously overused, and tragically misunderstood phrase.

    Here's a good working definition of "mission critical". If you'd be willing to hang upside down out of a 10 story window by a rope that gets cut if your software crashes, then it's mission critical. If not, then it isn't. Be sure and ask your salesperson if they'd be willing to undergo this test to prove their software's mission critical reliability.

    Hardware and software where people's lives are on the line are mission critical. Think Apollo missions and nuclear power plants, folks. Anything else, isn't.

    • Re:My personal favorite (Score:5, Insightful)

      by gl4ss ( 559668 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @12:36PM (#10299133) Homepage Journal
      well, they just mean by "misson critical" that if the program fails then your WHOLE OPERATION WILL BE SCREWED, it doesn't actually have any promise of that it wouldn't happen...

    • Re:My personal favorite (Score:5, Insightful)

      by conteXXt ( 249905 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @12:44PM (#10299211)
      I think it would depend on your company's "mission".

    • I hate the use of ASAP. When people use it I hear "I am lazy or ignorant and unable to commit to a formal due date."

    • Re:My personal favorite (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ultramk ( 470198 ) <ultramk@pacbel l . net> on Monday September 20, 2004 @01:05PM (#10299433)
      Hardware and software where people's lives are on the line are mission critical. Think Apollo missions and nuclear power plants, folks. Anything else, isn't.

      That's an extremely poor definition.

      "Mission critical" is a concept that very much relies on the nature of your "mission" (obviously). Not everyone has life-or-death issues hinging on our projects. Usually, it just means that you'll lose some customers, lose some sales, lose a few million dollars, lose your job, etc. However, just because no one's dying, doesn't mean that it isn't important. Obviously.

      For example, I used to work for a company that supplied printing plates to a cardboard box manufacturer (the agricultural industry). Our mission was getting these plates to the customer fast enough so that they could keep their multi-million presses running 24/7.

      The economics were as such: every hour the press wasn't running (waiting for plates to arrive, whatever), cost the company $55k.
      Plus overtime for the press operators.
      Plus not getting the boxes to their customer before their product started to wilt in the field.
      Plus delaying the schedule of the truck drivers who had to haul this stuff cross country.
      Plus my company getting a rep for not being able to come through in the clutch.

      Essentially, one "little" mistake (or delay, same thing) ends up affecting hundreds if not thousands of people, and their livelihoods.

      In my case, that's what "mission critical" meant.

      What's your mission?

      m-

  • "The Innovator's Dilemma" (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Beryllium Sphere(tm) ( 193358 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @12:28PM (#10299029) Journal
    Talking to your existing customers works fine in a static market. You can still win even if the technology is changing but the customers remain the same. "The Innovator's Dilemma" pulls a lot of material from a large study of the disk drive industry. Incumbent players stayed in business through radical changes in technology, dying only from changes in the market.

    Changes in the market happen when a "disruptive" technology comes along. "Disruptive" doesn't mean you have to rip out your assembly line: the disk drive makers succeeded at that several times. "Disruptive" means something that redefines the market.

    The personal computer is a clear example. Like other disruptive technologies it was cheaper than what was already there, sold to a different set of customers, and wasn't as good (*at first*) as the incumbent technology. DEC's customers continued using VAXen to do work that wouldn't fit on the first personal computers.

    Then the new customers buy in volume, mass production drives down the price, high volume pays for improvements, and before you can say "386" the disruptive technology is undermining the old technology. Companies like DEC wind up selling "proven" solutions to a shrinking customer base. Eventually they die.

    "Marketing", in its highest and most useful form, involves getting into the heads of your customers and understanding what they need before they know it themselves. But the future lies with people who are not your customers.

    The book listed other examples including hydraulic earth-moving equipment, but the principle was the same.

  • 10 Years ago I'd never have said this but... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by smartin ( 942 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @12:29PM (#10299036)
    The best thing that could happen to Sun is for IBM to buy them. It would IBM give them access to Java, they could merge Solaris, AIX and Linux, and Sun hardware would probably sell better than the equivalents in the IBM line.

  • Here's the best one I've seen by far: (Score:3, Funny)

    by Tibor the Hun ( 143056 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @12:30PM (#10299055)
    they even used the word "paradigm" !

    http://www.linuxelectrons.com/article.php/20040907 120917901 [linuxelectrons.com]

    I mean, just look at those numbers!

  • It was useful ... once upon a time (Score:5, Funny)

    by charleste ( 537078 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @12:30PM (#10299064)
    As a geek, and unable to understand "business-esse" AND looking for a job in the mid to late 90's, AND (most importantly) on a dare, I used one of the "BS Generators" to fluff up my "objective" on my resume. To my shagrin - it worked! I got more pegs/emails/phone calls on that particular resume than I ever have - previous or after. I truly think the "businessey-type" people really DO believe their own BS - and the "Mission Statements".
  • Who can come up with worse?

    Folks, it isn't the technology field that invented this junk. For years corporations have been spewing the same buzzword-riddled crud. My best example is the church I attend. It's a good church, but the mission statement and vision were written during a time when almost all the church members worked for a certain very large and prominent corporation that is in the area. Although I agree with the basic goals of both documents, it literally makes me ill to read them because they contain the famous 1980's buzzwords like "empowering." In my mind, both the mission statement and vision should have stuck to plain, straightforward language. But I guess it should come as no surprise. The people writing them would have naturally written them in the same way they had been trained at work.

  • Enter Bullfighter -- Ole! (Score:3, Informative)

    by theGreater ( 596196 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @12:33PM (#10299095) Homepage
    What a coincidince; I was just plugging a BS-o-meter earlier today.
    Named "Bullfighter" from Deloitte & Touch, it is an add-in for MSword and PowerPoint. You can download the regular version [deloitte.com] or a for the nonprofit sector. [deloitte.com]
    -theGreater Picador.

  • nation of salespeople (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Doc Ruby ( 173196 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @12:34PM (#10299107) Homepage Journal
    Marketers will say whatever people are buying. The real problem is people who don't parse the marketspeak for the info they need, and demand high signal/noise ratios. Part of the problem is making mere marketers into decisionmakers, telling engineers what to buy, and what to build. It's a symptom of the American sales culture, which infects all of us. We're better at selling things to people, like our labor time, than we are at delivering the goods. So the higher-paid decisionmaking jobs are filled with people better able to pitch themselves, rather than better able to make the decisions. The solution is more critical thinking taught in elementary school, where we can learn to intercept marketspeak as well as produce it.

  • Buzzwords I gathered on slashdot in 2 days (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Brobock ( 226116 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @12:39PM (#10299154) Homepage
    Leverage, Leveraging
    Synergies, Synergistic
    Vulnerability
    Attack Vector
    Streamline
    Deployment
    Interactive
    Buy-I n
    Stakeholders
    Key-Stone
    Enterprise
    Solution(s )
    Robust
    Intuitive
    Scalable
    Granular Level
    Key Performance Indicators
    Seamless
    Comprehensive offering
    meet or exceed
    cash reserves
    phenomenal growth
    Turn-key
    Paradigm-Shift, shifting
    Product Line
    State of the art technology
    dedicated team of professionals
    significant competitive advantage
    diversified
    fragmented market
    best of breed
    win-win situation
    Synchronicity
    Proven
    Cost-Effective
    Fruition
    Environment
    Proactive (ly)
    New Frontiers
    Agressive
    Empowerment
    Vertically integrated
    Groupware
    User-Centric
    Framework
    Co llaboration

  • Marketing Speak isn't the problem (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Archangel Michael ( 180766 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @12:42PM (#10299181) Journal
    Marketing Speak is the SYMPTOM of the problem. The problem is much deeper. It is an indication that the industry has stopped using NEW ideas to create better products, or new products never seen before. It is a sign of a Mature Market.

    How can you decide between the $9.95 mouse and the $11.95 one? Buzzwords and Marketing Technobabble.

    Or as one of my professors pointed out. When he asked his wife why she like one Fridge over another, she replied that she like the Handle. Everything else was the same in her mind.

  • Marketing isn't Killing Sun, Sun is (Score:5, Insightful)

    by cthrall ( 19889 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @12:46PM (#10299230) Homepage
    > But it isn't just Sun, surely.

    There's dumb marketing everywhere.

    But Sun could have the best marketing on the planet and still not be selling their products (hardware and OS), which have been largely commoditized. Yes, they have high-end servers...but years ago, cheaper Intel/AMD boxes weren't considered "server-class" hardware like they are now.

    There is a larger issue: Sun's ability to "pull an IBM" and figure out how to leverage the changing software/hardware world instead of defending their market share.

  • Blaming the victim (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Cocteaustin ( 702468 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @12:57PM (#10299361) Homepage
    This isn't the fault of technology marketers. It's the fault of technologists.

    Technology marketing at its best involves telling stories about technology to customers. It's as simple as that. Every time a technologist turns up his nose at a marketer, it makes it more difficult to tell that story. Even if you accept the fact that "engineers! are not good! at communicating! with customers!!!" it's still a fact that in the absence of input from engineers, marketers will be forced to fall back on meaningless cliches in their stories about what you build.

    So you know where I'm coming from, I'm a developer-slash-marketer working for a Silicon Valley company you've heard of -- I spend part of my time writing code examples for developers and another (small) chunk of my time writing and editing marketing copy.

    Breaking down the barriers between the geeks and the suits is something I've gotten very good at in the last few years. And here's a hint for geeks -- the suits are generally intimidated by you, which means it's your job to reach out to them and make them feel valued.

  • Sun is not quite like the auto industry (Score:3, Insightful)

    by upsidedown_duck ( 788782 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @01:01PM (#10299391)

    Just look at Solaris 10 (a big upgrade from Solaris 8 and 9) and the coming Niagara systems (32-way on a single chip and system board--thousands of threads and terabytes of RAM in a rack). Also, the SunOS kernel is nothing to laugh at. Java will always be debated, but it is fundamentally useful.

    I've always had the impression that Sun does make mistakes, but they can stomach the lessons from them. For example, I'd hope that the limited market for MAJC (a dual core CPU) has at least given them a running start for UltraSPARC IV and Niagara. Some people say that IBM beat Sun to dual core with POWER, but Sun did have one--just not UltraSPARC.

    The problem with the auto industry in the 1970s and 1980s is that they just produced utter stinking crap. I wonder if auto engineers from that period could have engineered their way out of an open box, looking at the terrible emissions controls (god-awful cobwebs of vacuum hoses and unreliable EGR values and carburetors from hell among other things) and the poor performance and economy of their cars. They put 90HP four-cylinder engines into 4000lb. SUVs back then...that's how terrible they were.

    Really, the only thing I worry about regarding Sun is that no one is willing to pay top dollar for a battle-tank-like workstation (SPARCstations, early Ultras), so Sun has inevitably gone to less expensive cases that aren't built from riveted heavy gauge steel. Otherwise, their hardware is generally very good and Solaris is quite good, and ever year they do make real progress. I'm already debating if I want Solaris 10 at home.

  • It's not just the language (Score:3, Interesting)

    by meburke ( 736645 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @01:15PM (#10299533)
    I used to sell Sun back in the mid-90's and I believe their problems run much deeper than just the language. In fact, I re-read Goldratt's "The Goal" and "It's Not Luck" occasionally, and Sun is one of the first companies that comes to mind for the the examples of things they DIDN'T/DONT do. Calling Scott McNealy "fiscally conservative" is an understatement. During the mid- 90's the local Sun office was devastated by workforce reductions and obsessive focussing on "headcount". Tech help was scarce, and morale was as low as I've seen in an office for a high-quality product. They moved from a well-organized top-floor office to a mediocre government-looking office across the street. You can only cut cost so far. You could cut costs to zero, and then where do you go to improve proitability? Sun never made it easy. The manuals were good for techs (although the first editions of some of the Solaris 6 and NIS manuals had major errors in them), the classes were great, but the customer focus was fuzzy and confused, just as the article said. And God help any unsuspecting IT manager who thought he could just load Solaris as easy as loading Windows! My impression was that the frustrations over the complex installation and administration process were major avoidable pitfalls in the Sun marketing plan. Luckily, I was mostly selling against NT 3.51 and had a major performance advantage at the time. The problem is, loading, configuring and administering Solaris is still a tedious, joyless task, even if it's done over a network. Troubleshooting administrative problems is not as easy as it could be, and the docs still suck.

  • Translating Technobabble (Score:5, Insightful)

    by smack.addict ( 116174 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @01:36PM (#10299774)
    The basic problem is that marketing is charged with explaining a technology to non-technologists. Often these technologies are quite difficult to explain. For example, how do you explain an identity management system to a CFO?

    Now, the knee-jerk slashdot reaction is to say that the CFO has no business making technology decisions. It is his business, however, to determine what the company is spending money on. Is this identity management system some IT toy? Or is it something that will make the company more profitable?

    You need to be able to explain technology to non-technologists in order for good technologies to sell, especially when those technologies are expensive.

    Buzzwords evolve when someone develops a way of expressing something that actually means something. Then others latch on to those words and dilute the strength of their meaning. Over time, people forget what the original meaning even was.

    Paradigm is a real world with a real meaning. In terms of describing technology, however, it has lost all semblance of meaning because it is now used to mean anything. Once upon a time, however...

  • Is "Slashdot" Killing Grammar? (Score:3, Funny)

    by thrills33ker ( 740062 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @02:03PM (#10300112) Homepage
    In an essay titled, tediously, "Crashdot?", an anonymous reader wonders how long the popular technology discussion forum Slashdot can survive in the face of its editors' blatant ignorance of grammatical errors that a child of 5 would find embarrassing. "Slashdot is going to fail this year if it does nothing but post duplicated articles, week-old news and obvious trolls", says the author. He adds: "If you are someone who never gets tired of misplaced apostrophes, mixed tenses, and generally incomprehensible prose, then subscribe to Slashdot and read as many of their article summaries as you can stomach." But it isn't just Slashdot, surely. This is a failing of online journalism in general. Hmm, doubtless we can all come up with our own examples far equally awful as those seen on Slashdot. Who can come up with worse?

  • The Network is the Computer (Score:3, Interesting)

    by tedgyz ( 515156 ) * on Monday September 20, 2004 @02:11PM (#10300208) Homepage
    Now there's a good one. Sun stole that line from Apollo computer. Apollo actually lived up the phrase. Anyone familiar with Domain/OS knows that the entire OS was built from day one with networking in mind.

    Apollo had great engineering, but terrible marketing. Sun understood that low price and good developer support would lead to success. Apollo, like so many great technology companies, believed that superior products would win. Instead, most popular and/or cheapest usually wins.

    It is sad to see NFS continues to be so widely used despite it's blatant design flaws. In contrast to MS networking, it actually looks good, but in reality, it is a nightmare. Anyone who has fought in the "Automounter Wars" can attest to that!

  • What I hate (Score:3, Insightful)

    by xyote ( 598794 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @03:53PM (#10301372)
    is when they come up with a new marketing buzzword and then don't give you any way to connect with it. Take Throughput Computing for example. Lots of processors for multithreading. That's cool, I'm into that. But I'm far more likely to see that on an Intel processors than anything from Sun. Unique hardware? No. Unique software? No. By unique I mean can you do anything that you can't do more cost effectively on non Sun hardware and software? And the answer is no.

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