Technobabble

Do People Actually Hear Themselves?

[austtr]

In a recent thread involving questions from a newbie, he/she was offered some advice about keeping things simple and to use plain language when explaining what they could actually offer their clients.

Then in the Fast forums this morning I see this little gem of obfuscation:

"The Stratify Discovery System is a taxonomy and categorization platform that enables information intensive enterprises to organize, classify and leverage their unstructured information resources "

Well thank you for sharing that with me.

I have absolutely no idea what that means. Ask 10 people what it means and I'd bet on at least 8 different answers.

Reminds me of the old story that the success of Word Perfect (one of the first major word processors) was due to the fact that the wives realized their developer husbands would write a user manual that only they would understand... and confuse the hell out of the buying public.

So the wives wrote it to be read by the average, totally non-techo user... and it built a reputation based on the fact that people could actually understand what it offered and how to use it.

True story? Who knows.... but it's a good reminder of how simplicity is often the basis of acceptance.

[Go2]

Here's an early warning system for technobabble [qs9000.com] ;)

[bird]

Could it be that you guys are confusing techno-babble with marketing-speak? Those are two entirely different animals.

[lawman]

Technobabble, marketingbabble, legalbabble, ad infinitum ad nauseum :) - jargon is for the clique and everyday language is for the masses. Know your audience and run it by somebody before you publish it.

lawman