Slightly Askew

Some time ago, an article by Erin Kissane stirred a hatred inside of me.  Not because I didn’t like the article; I loved the article.  She give a thorough and humourous explanation as to why the word solution is, well, shit.

“Solution” is much too vague to be useful.

And she’s absolutely right.  I went to an ebusiness seminar today and every godforsaken IT company in attendance were parading their products as solutions.  Even better (and by that, I mean worse), an end-to-end solution.  As I sit writing this, I’m still no closer to fathoming-out exactly what those products actually did.

So this nonsense has to stop now.  Just because the financial sector is often riddled with self-indulgent jargon, the IT crowd should not be trying to play catch-up.  If you’re a consumer, and someone can’t explain what something does without using the word solution, that something probably isn’t worth buying.

After all: you can call a turd a bowel disposal solution, but it’s still a turd.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 20th, 2008 at 10:06 pm and is filed under Rants, Words. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.