Product Description That Isa Commercial And Nota Description

Typical of software companies.

A description that is intended to be a commercial and not really describe the thing. Such a description usually uses a lot of buzzwords designed specifically with the product in mind. It also uses buzzwords and catch phrases like "revolutionizes","enterprise", "production quality" and "best-of-breed".

The biggest transgressor is probably Brockschmidts book Inside Ole, which runs something like a thousand pages and is one great big commercial for OLE.

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The term coined by John Tibbets is "marketecture". [Tibbets, John. "IBM Enterprise Architectures: A Comparison of Vendor Initiatives." Trends in Technology, 1995.]

"Marketecture uses an architectural-looking diagram, but the arrangement of the pieces has no real technical significance. Marketectural charts are like a set of shelves that display products, components and standards to the consumer but do not represent how the software works...."

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Example product names:

• Honeywell "Ultimate" computer. (A mini that was a pain to reboot, as it could only boot from its 9-track tape, not its hard drive!)

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On the other hand, there have been some local names that were really honest:

• "Expensive Typewriter" = one of the first word processing programs.