The world is getting more complicated, but you knew that already. It’s not because our cars talk to us, our refrigerators are more intelligent than we are and we have devices that communicate our thoughts three minutes before we think them. Our language, too, is getting more complicated, particularly in the business world.
Do you, like me, yearn for the days of “customer service software” and “e-mail management” companies rather than companies designated by 97-word euphemisms you can read three times and still not understand? Do you trip through designations of Smith & Jones Corp. as a “best-of-breed accounting and financial management enterprise of forward-thinking genius and backwards-facing financial adjustments of convenience and ethics complications avoidance solutions” company? Have you ever noticed that the longer these industry appellations are, the less descriptive they become?
Have you recently run across an acronym you know you’re supposed to know (as an industry expert), but cannot figure out what the hell it stands for, regardless of how many sources you consult? Do you ever get the impression that industry insiders are simply throwing in made-up acronyms to confuse you and make their insights seem more sophisticated?
Have you ever ditched your plans to purchase a piece of software called ÄSol-Ü-tioNN® because you have no idea how to spell it, write it or pronounce it and you don’t want to look like an idiot in front of the board?
If so, you’re not alone. Many marketing programs drifting through the tech industry today forget that there is a disconnect between how people speak about companies and how they read about them. If you name your company “Acme Integrated Messaging Management And Multimedia Optimization (IMMAMO) Group, LLC: A U.S. Division Of A Subsidiary Of Verybigcompany & Sons & Nephews & Neighbors Technology Incorporated”, know that when I refer to you in conversation or in blogs, you’ll be called Acme Corp., and everyone will privately imagine Wile E. Coyote zooming past repetitive cacti on rocket-propelled roller skates when your company is discussed.
Just remember that during an average press conference, for example, while you’re discussing your epically named company and several of your products, and your partner and its products of galactic appellations, you may inadvertently end up tacking on an additional 20 minutes of talk time just to conquer the pronunciations of the names of your own intellectual properties. We members of the press, notorious already for our short attention spans, are likely to become bored by the fifth mention of “prodigious mobile international field sales and service customer-facing delivery enhancement optimization on a wireless, lemon-scented platform” and wander away into the press room to inspect the tray of baked goods and fight over the last can of Diet Coke.
There is nothing that fills me more with horror than a nine-page press release that contains exactly seven sentences and more incomprehensible symbols than the funerary cartouche of an ancient Egyptian lawyer.
Publishing in the tech industry becomes difficult, as well. At Customer Interaction Solutions®, for example, staff-written articles and contributed features must be arduously worked over by myself, the Director of Advanced Best-of-Breed Predictive Perspective Optimization; and David Butcher, Handcrafter of Forward-Looking Technological Literary Value Propositions and Hyperbolic Prevention. We then pass the prototype magazine on to Lisa Morris, Artistic Overseer Of Aesthetically Optimized Customer-Directed Interior Graphical Rhetoric, and Alan Urkawich, Surface Design Engineer Of Exterior Customer-Facing Expression.
I look forward to the day when the fashion will come around again (as fashions always do) for minimalism in business terminology: product and industry sector names so spare they’d bring tears of admiration to the eyes of those artists who paint huge canvases one color and sell them for $2.5 million a piece.
Until then, we’ll continue to sort through products that offer enterprisewide, cross-JUJUBEE-compliant, preconfigured, upward-facing, prebuilt, analytically strategic and on-demand data-flipping mission-critical accelerated wireless cross-platform processes.
It’s enough to give an editor a severe recurring cranial pain event characterized by the engorgement of the network of human cerebral blood vessels. CIS
The author may be contacted at [email protected].
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