In the pro­cess of doing some a quick mar­ket sur­vey I was struck by the tend­ency of some soft­ware pub­lish­ers to coin unique acronyms to estab­lish their tech­no­lo­gical cre­den­tials. To be hon­est I am not unfa­mil­iar with this pro­cess and did my own fair share of this in another life, but I was sur­prised when see­ing it from the other side.

The basic pro­pos­i­tion is this: You find your­self in a mar­ket­space with a num­ber of com­pet­it­ors that, in the eyes of your poten­tial cus­tom­ers, basic­ally accom­plish the same task. Higher, faster, che­apper, more effi­ciently are all won­der­ful things, but are open to dir­ect com­par­ison and the actual busi­ness case is much too com­plex to address using such simple descriptors. So, what to do? The answer is to describe earth-shattering pro­pri­et­ary pro­cess using clever acronyms, some of which may actu­ally con­tain real words, that sug­gest that you have a sci­entific basis for differentiation.

The real­ity is some of these terms and descrip­tions of pro­cess or method are quite valid and simply expressed in a rather abstract way. Oth­ers one sus­pects are actu­ally ‘full of sound and fury, sig­ni­fy­ing, not much of any­thing actu­ally real.’ How can one cut through the mar­ket­ing smoke?

Examples to fol­low…