What do they do?

Interessante thread su FuckedCompany.com sull’ennesima dotcom che sta per andare a gambe all’aria. Un lettore commenta:

I find that most of the companies in FC have sites that don’t tell me what they do in 10 seconds or less. I could see if you had a really complex product, but these products are all usually “simplify buisness operations” types. Well how does your product do this? When car tires are sold they don’t say “will increase your frictional coefficient during high velocity non-linear accelerative differentials” the say “These tires will keep you and your children on the road better then anyone elses!”

Le due risposte a questo commento sono una sarcastica:

Well, of COURSE they have to go into obsessive detail. There’s that little thing about the Emperor’s new clothes. If you knew right off the bat what these morons were selling (namely “We’re going into business so the CEO can get rich and get hair implants to replace all of the hair he burned out on bad cocaine in college”), you wouldn’t have anything to do with them, right? However, if the explanation of “What We Do” is buried in enough jargon that your eyes glaze over within the first few sentences, they have a better chance of selling their services and “alliances” to fellow MBA geeks who want hair implants themseves. Does this make sense now?

e l’altra pessimista:

We all seem to learn how to read this male bovine post processed excreta. There isn’t much simple language left in marketing. But that is hardly news. Even the barrels on the highway are formally known as “impact attenuation devices”. We should all be issued a shovel (excuse me, lever action effluent transfer device) at birth just to make our way through the world.

That, however, is not the worst of it. The worst of it is actually the internals of the tech world. That is where they put all the people who flunked english and have them create concepts which they describe with metaphors. I actually found to my horror some years ago that I understood an IBM manual. A clear signal the mind had burned too many of its bridges.

Required reading nel corso “Web Communication: speak with your own voice“.