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Tech Jargon 927, Business Technology Blog 1
via WSJ.com: Business Technology by (author unknown) on May 07, 2008
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A small victory in an important war.:Posted by Ben Worthen
The Business Technology Blog scored a minor victory in our war against tech jargon today.
Don’t let Buzz write your press releasesLast week, we met with execs from Dell, who were making the rounds to talk about their latest back-office tech equipment and software, which uses technology called “virtualization” that makes this equipment run more efficiently. It’s important stuff for tech departments, but it makes drying paint look exciting. And rather than discussing these technologies in language that could make them accessible to a broader audience, techies have a bad habit of describing them with jargon that makes eyes glaze over.
Here’s the first sentence from the draft version of the press release Dell shared with this blog before our meeting: “Dell is driving the next wave of virtualization solutions beyond hypervisors and hardware consolidation with end-to-end solutions tuned to the speed of businesses of all sizes.”
Still with us? We complained about the jargon-packed prose to the Dell folks (Dell has a habit of bringing small armies to meet with journalists). We were especially mournful because the execs we were meeting with were able to describe the benefits of the technology they’re introducing today in plain English: This new equipment is so efficient that it can cut the cost of running a data center in half.
We must have said something that resonated with the Dell people. Check out the first two sentences of the final press release the company sent us last night: “Dell today announced its broadest lineup of dedicated virtualization solutions ever. More than a dozen new servers, tools, and services simplify the deployment and management of virtualization in Enterprises of any size.”
It’s not English, but it’s close.
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