Tech buzzwords may sound neat, but what do they mean?
01/20/05 13:21 Filed in: Writing
Excerpts from an AP article on the semantic blight of high-tech – buzzwords.
Tech buzzwords may sound neat, but what do they mean?
By Allison Linn, Associated Press
"Solution" used to be a fine word. If you had a problem, you needed a solution.
"But now, "It's used so much in the tech industry that it's lost its meaning," laments Schellhardt, the director of editorial services for the public relations firm Ketchum in New York.
"These days, high-tech companies don't release products, they provide solutions. And those products — er, solutions — don't just run a program or play a song. Instead, they enable experiences, optimize agility or even sometimes make people's passions come alive..."
"Paul is still hoping to eradicate the word "scalable," which is fancy tech talk for something that can get bigger.
"My son is scalable, he's got built-in room to grow," he quips [...]
"I don't see the buzzword craze stopping," says Brett Good, an executive with staffing firm Robert Half International, whose Accountemps unit recently did a study on annoying buzzwords. "In some ways, it's almost becoming filler, like 'um' or 'ah.' ... It's something that's just been built into the lexicon of American business."
Read the full article on the USA Today website.