Words are important

Back in my elementary school days, my dad handed me a book called Words Are Important. The well-worn tome was required reading for students in his day, as it taught them the fundamentals of spelling, grammar and sentence structure. The world of technology has its share of important words too, but many of them are rapidly losing their meaning. 

When a company rolls out a new product or service, they’re always excited about it; that’s a given. Shortly thereafter, press releases are sent to new outlets touting these new offerings, and new conference are subsequently held. While informative, press material often demonstrates an over-reliance on certain nouns and adjectives. I am, of course, referring to industry buzzwords.

Picture this: you’re a reporter for a tech news publication, and you’ve just received a press release in your email inbox from a major company. You want to file a story about it for your audience, but you find the press release is heavy on buzzwords and colourful language. While the release certainly does its job in getting the word out, you’re a bit put off by some of the wording, and when your write your article, you’ll most likely try to avoid using those same words. In fact, they’re used so much that they’ve all but lost their true meaning.

During my time covering the tech industry, I have come across several buzzwords that I think should be eliminated from further use (or abuse). Below is a small sampling of some of these heavily overused terms.

Solution(s)

Every company in the tech space has an extensive product line. Yet, when describing these products, they collectively refer to them as “solutions,” as if to say that the world is full of problems. While there certainly are problems that these products could solve, using a blanket term like solution to describe them often doesn’t do them justice. Plus, the way this term is used, it’s almost as if these companies are using it like a crutch of sorts. A better idea would be to use words like product, software or device instead. Rather than just say your product is a solution, I think it would make more sense to use descriptive nouns instead because they actually tell the reader or prospective customer what the product is and what it can do.

Learnings

Nothing makes me bristle more than hearing this word because it’s not an actual word at all. I have covered events where this non-word was dropped by some high-ranking executives several times within the course of one keynote address, and it really incensed me. You’re talking up the many exciting things that the company you represent has in store for its customers with such bravado, and when you discuss the research that went into these developments, you describe them using a term that doesn’t even appear in the dictionary. I don’t understand that. If you’re going to talk about that, why not use words like research, development, findings and results instead? These are all dictionary-certified words that serve the same purpose as this invented word.

Innovation

Innovation is a term that has been used and abused by many industries for years. Most notably, the automotive and tech industries seem to get an especially big kick out of throwing this buzzword around when discussing something new they’ve released. The creation of any new product, process or service always has its roots in ideas. A team sets out to build a better mousetrap – that itself is a cliché – and they use this word as a hype-builder. And that’s essentially what it has become. What was once a term used to describe new, creative and difference-making ideas and offerings has been degraded to an all-but-meaningless word that is bandied about just to make something more attractive or compelling.

Will these overused words disappear from the tech industry’s lexicon anytime soon? Most likely not. As long as there are disruptive innovations that can hypercontextualize and generate ROI through synergistic implementation, there will be buzzwords around to add useless fluff. A product description should rely less on fancy words and more on actually telling would-be customers why they need this item in their lives.