The heat of competition is forcing software vendors to take some annoying steps
 

Mad Dogs and Englishmen

Perhaps the intolerable heat in the San Francisco Bay Area is getting to me today, because I have the uncharacteristic urge to get a couple things off my chest. To be specific, I have two beefs with the vendor community:

1. Stop mangling the English language. I refer here to the marketing fad of anointing new products (or in some cases, old products) with names that mix upper- and lower-case letters randomly, include periods or dashes in complete disregard for the rules of grammar, and add or eliminate letter spaces as if they were optional equipment. And of course, they are all preceded by the letter “e” — as in exasperating.

This approach has been practiced (and tolerated) in small doses for some time, but apparently, the liberating nature of the Internet is now influencing marketing organizations to free themselves utterly from the fetters of the English language. This alphabetical morass makes the much-lamented (and now old-fashioned) acronym disease appear benign. When laid end to end in narrative copy — as we frequently do in the media — these invented words look like encrypted hieroglyphics.

The motivating force here, of course, is branding and awareness — the need, as old as the hills, to break through the “clutter.” Unfortunately, thanks to the fact that these exotic applications of the Roman alphabet are spreading like the Ebola virus, the clutter is now thicker than ever. And I have to believe that the people irked by this trend include not just analysts and trade journalists, but customers too.

The English language has famously integrated assaults on its integrity for centuries, and William Shakespeare is well-known for his creative contribution of new words to that idiom. But that doesn’t mean that we should actively treat it contemptuously. Folks, this isn’t Scrabble with no rules: cUT*iT-OUt.

2. Stop offering solutions for nonexistent problems. Vendors are increasingly overselling left-field applications in order to justify their software and services. For example, Oracle hoped to make a big splash a few weeks ago by announcing the availability of its Internet File System (IFS). In this assault on the Windows File System, the citadel of the Microsoft monopoly, Oracle believes that customers will be willing to cleave all semblance of data management from the operating system and move it into the DBMS. As Larry Ellison put it, “the user interface shouldn’t be part of the OS; it should be part of the browser.”

IFS has some nice touches — super-fast file searches, check-in/check-out, and an optional cloned Windows interface — but I find it hard to believe that IT managers and executives are lamenting the incumbent file system’s modest functionality to the extent they’re ready to toss it out the window. (No pun intended.) Trading a Microsoft lock-in for an Oracle one sounds like a wash to me.

“Pervasive computing,” of course, is currently the most fertile source of pie-in-the-sky applications. In his keynote at CMP’s E-Business Expo in June, Mark Bregman, IBM’s general manager for pervasive computing, rolled video of a concept automobile with a voice interface. The idea is that the driver can interact with the system — which sounds eerily like the “voicemail lady” — to discuss engine anomalies, driving directions, or dinner plans. Perhaps I lack vision, but the last thing I want to do during my commute is have a nice chat with my car, even if it helps me find a Chinese restaurant five minutes sooner. If you disagree, I’d love to hear why.

Similarly, whatever happened to Sun Microsystems’ Jini? Bill Joy is a genius, but I have to believe there are better uses of his time than making kitchen appliances communicate. Thus far, the Java development community appears to agree.