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…