The Cranky Product Manager

Confess Your Sins: Buzzword Abuse

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. 

Marketing Geniuses & Marketing Fads

Of course.  Of COURSE DysfunctoSoft pursued this bonehead ground-breaking marketing "strategy".  Hey, without this type of inspired marketing , why there might not be a "Dysfuncto" in DysfunctoSoft.

What, you ask, is the Cranky Product Manager bitching about this time?

Well, about a year ago DysfunctoSoft's Marketing VP, who thinks of himself as a visionary, read an article about the Next Big Thing: the fantabulous SECOND LIFE virtual world.  By some weird circumstance of the universe, this nimrod "visionary" always envisions the same future as the American Airlines in-flight magazine.  Funny that.

Anyway, Veep Nimrod got on the case.  His mission in life became securing DysfunctoSoft a corporate presence in Second Life.  The future of DysfunctoSoft depended on it.  It was a critical new avenue to potential customers. Because, as you know, C-level executives with multi-million dollar software budgets are usually hanging out there. Poor, lonely CIOs. Always wandering around virtual worlds aimlessly, thinking, "If only more enterprise software vendors had islands in Second Life, well then my Second Life could be just as tedious and soul-sucking as my first!" and "Man, I wish I'd run into a virtual software salesperson so I could hear a dreary sales pitch without having to deal with the real-world free dinners, drinks, and lap dances." 

Anyway, not wanting to be hasty, Veep Nimrod did some market research on his ground-breaking concept.  He asked his 12-year old son what he thought of the idea.  "WICKED AWESOME" the kid said, in between rounds of Halo.

Emboldened by such powerful market validation, Veep Nimrod put his plan in motion. There was so much work to do and not a minute to waste. And now, finally, after _14 months!_ of weekly status meetings, managing vigorous debate among multiple cross-functional teams, and intensive work on his avatar, Veep Nimrod launched DysfunctoSoft corporate presence in Second Life. 

Yippee.

Too bad Second Life is now a ghost town.  Not even lonely CIOs hang out there anymore.  Number of leads generated by this revolutionary marketing effort after 2 months? ZERO.

But at least this all-consuming epic marketing campaign distracted the Dysfuncto Marketing Geniuses for over a year.  It kept them from inflicting any more damage to the Cranky Product Manager's beloved product.  If they hadn't been otherwise occupied, the Geniuses probably would have added something like "Web 2.0" or "Social Networking Edition" to the CPM's product's name.  You know, some kind of faddish phrase that has no relation to what the product is or does. Because the Geniuses want to make absolutely SURE that customers (and sales people) have no clue what the product actually does.  Because confusing the fuck out of them is the sure way to customers' wallets, right?. Hey, if a tactic works for date rapists, it must be a good idea for enterprise software, agreed?

Watch out Marketing Geniuses.  The Cranky Product Manager is disgusted with you. And her avatar can kick your avatars' virtual asses.