Friday, June 23, 2006
Business Communications Suck
Like most only children, I am amazingly self-centered. The world did not exist before I was born and it will perish in a fiery blaze the day I take my last breath.
Since I live in this delusional vacuum of solitude, I had always assumed the problems with corporate communications only started when I began cutting, pasting and repurposing the 14 famous buzzwords of IT marketing as a career.
You know the words I'm talking about; reliable, scalable, robust, flexible, integrated, ROI, Return on Investment, infrastructure, outsourcing, off-shoring, efficiency, profitability, challenges and wait for it…Thought Leadership!
Well, slap my mouth, call me Sally and make me pay for my own dinner, because I have recently discovered that corporate America has been bullshitting us for the better part of a half century.
Take a second to peruse this IBM Ad fron back in the 1950’s.
This ad states, “Electron Tubes – Fast, Versatile, Accurate”. It’s a fucking tube. The only way it is fast is if you hurl it at someone (preferably the writer of this horrid copy). Versatile - not unless this tube can facilitate computations while making me a ham sandwich or giving me a blow job. Accurate – hopefully the computation it helps move along the “Information Horse and Buggy Path” is accurate, but as for the tube it self being accurate I have to disagree. I heard this particular tube give a speech in 1954 and its prediction that we would be sharing information via telepathy by 1972 was totally inaccurate.
I take solace in the fact that I am not trail blazer in muddled corporate communications, but rather continuing the proud tradition of “WTF Messaging”.
Since I live in this delusional vacuum of solitude, I had always assumed the problems with corporate communications only started when I began cutting, pasting and repurposing the 14 famous buzzwords of IT marketing as a career.
You know the words I'm talking about; reliable, scalable, robust, flexible, integrated, ROI, Return on Investment, infrastructure, outsourcing, off-shoring, efficiency, profitability, challenges and wait for it…Thought Leadership!
Well, slap my mouth, call me Sally and make me pay for my own dinner, because I have recently discovered that corporate America has been bullshitting us for the better part of a half century.
Take a second to peruse this IBM Ad fron back in the 1950’s.
This ad states, “Electron Tubes – Fast, Versatile, Accurate”. It’s a fucking tube. The only way it is fast is if you hurl it at someone (preferably the writer of this horrid copy). Versatile - not unless this tube can facilitate computations while making me a ham sandwich or giving me a blow job. Accurate – hopefully the computation it helps move along the “Information Horse and Buggy Path” is accurate, but as for the tube it self being accurate I have to disagree. I heard this particular tube give a speech in 1954 and its prediction that we would be sharing information via telepathy by 1972 was totally inaccurate.
I take solace in the fact that I am not trail blazer in muddled corporate communications, but rather continuing the proud tradition of “WTF Messaging”.
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(Okay, I'm rewriting this because my fucking crash-proof Mac crashed and I had to reboot.)
Back then, those tubes were fast. It's all relative. Put it to you this way. Can the tubes calculate the square root of pi faster than my brain can? Yes. Can they stand up to the billions of calculations per second of the modern computer? No way in hell.
Back then, it was state of the art. Then again, in 1792 the Cotton Gin was state of the art. In 2400 BC the abacus was state of the art. It's all a matter of perspective. It won't be long before that 2.16 GHz Intel Dual Core machine with the 4 GHz of RAM will seem quaint. ("How did we get by with those things? I mean, you can't even hook it into your brain!")
A couple of posts ago I included a link to the brochure Apple released in 1983 introducing us to the Macintosh. They had to explain in detail what a mouse was and how proud they were of their 32 bit processor. They were particularly proud of the fact that you could use fonts.
My dad, Col. Spaulding, worked for a large business computer company for about 30 years. There was a time not too long ago when he had colleagues who swore up and down that there was no way anyone would ever need more than 640k of RAM.
As for the corporate communications, well, just remember that nothing is truly original. All great ideas and innovation has been built on what has come before.
Even in corporate marketing.
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Back then, those tubes were fast. It's all relative. Put it to you this way. Can the tubes calculate the square root of pi faster than my brain can? Yes. Can they stand up to the billions of calculations per second of the modern computer? No way in hell.
Back then, it was state of the art. Then again, in 1792 the Cotton Gin was state of the art. In 2400 BC the abacus was state of the art. It's all a matter of perspective. It won't be long before that 2.16 GHz Intel Dual Core machine with the 4 GHz of RAM will seem quaint. ("How did we get by with those things? I mean, you can't even hook it into your brain!")
A couple of posts ago I included a link to the brochure Apple released in 1983 introducing us to the Macintosh. They had to explain in detail what a mouse was and how proud they were of their 32 bit processor. They were particularly proud of the fact that you could use fonts.
My dad, Col. Spaulding, worked for a large business computer company for about 30 years. There was a time not too long ago when he had colleagues who swore up and down that there was no way anyone would ever need more than 640k of RAM.
As for the corporate communications, well, just remember that nothing is truly original. All great ideas and innovation has been built on what has come before.
Even in corporate marketing.
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