DysfunctoSoft is looking for new markets to pollute, and thus the Cranky Product Manager has been researching new but related markets for her product. She's been trying to understand the technologies, the lingo, the vendors and the products. … you know, that kind of crap.
And let the CPM tell you, it is far more difficult to figure out than it should be. She can't image how difficult it must be for customers.
Why? The Cranky Product Manager blames it on the Product Marketing Geniuses and their noxious habit of relabeling older products with the latest buzzwords. ESPECIALLY when the product doesn't actually do that new thing that everyone is all hyped up about.
Example: Today more than a few vendors claim their products support "content feeds" for alerting and letting users know about new content. Well, in the year 2008, "feeds" directly implies "RSS feeds" – a standards-based, pull technology, where the content can be pulled and displayed by a slew of standards-based client programs. Unfortunately, when you scratch the surface on some of these so-called "content feed" features, you'll find some 10-year old proprietary "push technology" crud, a la PointCast (remember them?).
Why did these Product Marketing Geniuses recast their push crud as feeds? So they can claim they are Web 2.0 — an umbrella concept that usually includes RSS feeds somewhere in there, along with tags and other user-provided meta data, drag/drop web apps, etc.
Kind of reminds you of a 42-year old guy who dresses like a skateboarder, yet doesn't skateboard, doesn't it? Who does he think he's fooling? 20-something babes? Riiiigggghhhht.
Another example: the term "storage virtualization." The CPM can't put it better than Alessandro Pirelli. He says the term means nothing at all: "Depending on the vendor you are talking to, storage virtualization is
the abstraction of the directories, of local volumes, of the remote
volumes, of the array, etc. So even well known concepts like RAID
or distributed file systems become storage virtualization and get sold
as brand new, cutting-edge technology enhancements."
ARRRRGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHH.
The CPM asks you, WHAT the HELL are we doing to our customers when we, as product managers and product marketers, engage in this type of crap? So many of us are the source of this problem…. But then the CPM had a thought. Maybe together we can help fix this situation and undo some of the wrongs we've inflicted on the world. Maybe we can come up with a "No Bullshit Glossary" of the most frequently abused buzzwords…
The Cranky Product Manager invites you to submit examples of Buzzword Abuse — situations where a company deliberately tries to put lipstick on a pig and claim their old crud is actually the new stuff that is so "hot" right now.
{ 16 comments… read them below or add one }
what about “bi directional Outlook integration”?? Our product is supposed to do this…even though what we really do is READ your email pst file into our interface and when you click the email button in our application, it launches a new email form — outlook’s email form. How’s that for integration???
How about using the word “rich visualizations” to mean the same old bar and pie charts?
What about the other way around?
When an industry is abusing its customer base by trying to use a new buzzword for the same old thing? Take Unified Communications for example – it’s the Convergence of 2008: http://blog.radvision.com/voipsurvivor/2008/07/31/there-is-no-such-thing-as-uc-social-media-web20-or-phone20/
My favorite is still “web 2.0″, because there is no standard definition for it, but everyone uses it, and everyone now wants everything to be “web 2.0″. My company seems to think that all it takes to make a site web 2.0 is to redesign it to remove sharp corners, add rounded corners, and lots of gradients. We’ve spent tons of money on redesigning a well known site so that it’s “web 2.0″…even though it has no social networking component, which is the one thing that seems to be at the heart of all web 2.0 definitions.
Other random buzzwords that piss me off: “offline”, as in, “This is off topic for this meeting, why don’t we take this discussion offline.” People do not go offline, printers do!
And “bandwidth”, as in “I just don’t have the bandwidth to attend the weekly meetings for all of these projects.”
Ugh.
Lately, our company is using the word “mashup” a lot. Is our old portal software a mashup platform? You be the judge.
Even better, my former company calls it’s plain jane web-based interface a “portal”. This web interface does absolutely no aggregation with content from outside sources.
To me, portals are like My Yahoo!, and bring together information from different sources and present them on the same page, while allowing the user to choose and configure how it is shown on the page.
One of my pet peeves is turning nouns or adjectives into verbs and creating a new word that didn’t exist before, simply because it’s easy to do.
Today, I saw a doozie: “Agilize” used in the phrase “Agilizing Product Management”.
Ouch!!!!!
Can I get a whut-whut for “SaaS?”
In my country we used to call this an ASP… back in 1996…
what about “rich internet applications” for any app with a web interface?
I sort of miss “robust.” It seems like an antique now that we have so many fancier ways of saying “does its job.”
One that annoys me is “systemic”. So many times I hear “we need a systemic solution for this”. What you really need is a dictionary so you can understand what systemic really means.
A word becomes a buzzword under competitive pressure. The first vendor that uses the word defines it in the market. A competitor comes along with a slightly different meaning. Another competitor, another slightly different meaning. The word is finally meaningless, when competitors have sucked its meaning dry.
A glossary doesn’t help, because the word truely has so many meanings it becomes a matter of which meaning do you mean. That should be communicated in a vendor’s marcom. What you cannot do is compare one vendor’s meaning with another. The partitions the vendors are creating with their marcom is intended to be exclusionary of that of other vendors.
A lot of the terms commented on are creations not of a vendor, but a market. SaaS differs from web services, because web services or ASP got translated into utility computing, and utility computing is a loser for the vendor. You cannot create an exit barrier around a true utility computing application, so have fun trying to make money with it. The same is true of SaaS, but the realization has not set in yet.
There is a way to make money in the web services situation, but it isn’t through thinking you now own your customer’s data, since they entered it into your system. Surprisingly, web service companies do sue their customers when the customers try to get their own data back. It is such a mess.
Web 2.0 is the biggest hype ever. It is just AJAX, which makes a web app equivallent to the C++ application of the past. It is not a mind boggling new reality.
I actually had to talk a Marcom manager out of “ubiquitous” once. It took me like three months.
My Favorites:
- Seamless
- Uncompromising
- Robust
- Smart
- Rich
- Intuitive
Can be combined with any or all of the following:
- Solution
- Integration
- Media
- Support
- Interface
No combination actually provides any real information about a product feature or benefit. But I still use them a lot. Guess I can try to do better.
Oooh, I thought of another one: iterative. As in: “Documenting requirements is an iterative process – project team members review the requirements document, and with each review it changes.”
Iterative means repetitive. What they actually mean is that the document evolves.
If you are talking about product buzz words, then I am not up with all you web guys. I just make plain jane Windows Mobile and PC apps.
But, two of my favorite meaningless “words” are “Productize” and “Customer Facing”.
Productize means to take an idea or a prototype and make a real product out of it. Why don’t you just say we are going to make a product out of that? Isn’t that why you make a prototype in the first place??
“Customer Facing” implies to me that the product has a part that does not face the customer. So you are saying my product has an ass? This term is most often used around here to refer to the people in the organization that actually talk to customers as in “The customer facing elements of the organization”. It is also used to imply that they are going to build a business unit that actually pays attention to its customers. “We are going to reorganize to be more customer facing.” What a novel concept. Gee, I thought that was what I was doing, but since I am not Web 2.0, I guess not.