Tech's plea: Just the facts
Published: 29 Apr 2003 13:48 BST
A few years ago, I was sitting in the audience when Ralph Nader stirred a bored assembly of tech executives out of their after-dinner indifference with a tart tongue-lashing.
"You just make it too hard for regular people to understand what it is you're talking about," the peripatetic consumer activist and sometime presidential candidate said. Holding up a collection of trade magazine pages, he sneered as he read one undecipherable headline after another.
"Nobody can understand this gobbledygook," he said.
That got folks' attention -- though hardly their assent. After all, technology was supposed to be hard: if it was all so bloody simple, you'd find every Tom, Dick and Harry hanging out a shingle along Silicon Valley's El Camino Real.
We can debate the claim, but what's not open to disputation is the technology industry's particular penchant for creating acronyms, buzzwords and verbal obfuscations, a habit that has worsened as the time line advanced from PC-based computing to network-based computing to Internet-based computing (to whatever's next).
This passion for market babble has more recently resulted in the annoying tendency of some big information technology (IT) providers to redefine whatever existing products and services in their arsenal as part of an "on demand" computing revolution.
What is on-demand computing? That depends on whom you ask.
My good friends at BusinessWeek made it the centrepiece of a breathless portrayal of Sam Palmisano's new tenure as IBM's chief executive.
"The vision of on-demand computing is downright audacious," the magazine declared. "It proposes joining all of the thousands of computers and applications in enormous enterprises, and putting them to work seamlessly and in unison -- not only in-house, but also with partners and customers."
That could have been lifted from Netscape's marketing department long before the fall.
Maybe I was the dumbest person in the room, but after spending the better part of two hours with a collection of reporters listening to a senior IBM executive explain eBusiness Innovations, I felt in dire need of a mental enema. Besides cooking up a new way to drum up more business, what was the big deal? This sounded more like another one of those goofy marketing monikers that frequently come down the tech turnpike to quicken everyone's pulse rate. (Remember Microsoft's "Information at your fingertips" campaign?)
Essentially, IBM is surrounding the former PricewaterhouseCoopers consulting business that it acquired last year with a lot of technology, such as grid computing and self-managing features, courtesy of the company's autonomic computing initiative. In this new world order, anything can get outsourced as a collection of services -- from simple communications right up to grid computing -- thus relieving customers of the burden. Throw in some attendant expertise in vertical businesses and voila, you've got "the future of IT computing."
Interesting, but does it constitute a revolution? IBM could just as easily have renamed it "outsourcing plus" (or time-sharing redux, where metered capacity lets customers pay for only the assets that they actually use.) The rest is all spin.
Hewlett-Packard is no less effusive about what it dubs "On Demand Solutions," but again, it's the same basic idea: here's an alternative to traditional IT ownership and support that lets customers adjust to fluctuations in demand. Same goes for Sun Microsystems, which offers similar lingo about on-demand access to grid computing, terascale computing and even services for education.
You have to wonder about the wisdom of the over-the-top, we-just-reinvented-the-universe approach. It's easy to understand why so many vendors are eager to bang that drum as loudly as possible. But maybe if they just stopped talking in tongues, they'd get a better reception.
IT customers are thirsting for straight talk -- a commodity that will always be in demand and should seep into on-demand territory.
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