Editor's Blog: Winning the war on technology marketing speak

Usually when I meet a technology company boss for the first time, he is itching to fire off a payload of marketing speak - hoping to persuade me with talk of world-leading seamless end-to-end solutions, and the such like.

At that point in the conversation I usually retreat into my bunker of journalistic scepticism and wait until they run out of ammunition.

So when I met with the chief executive of a large-ish systems integrator this week, I was ready to don my tin hat through the early barrage of weapons-grade sales hyperbole.

Yet, strangely, there was little talk of real-time enterprise-ready holistic scalability on offer.

Instead, he was much more interested in explaining to me just how solid his company's balance sheet was and how little debt they were carrying.

Similarly, recently I met with another software company that was less interested in showing off new technology and much more proud of how quickly it could balance its books following the end of its financial year.

As I pointed out a few months back, there has been - courtesy of the credit crunch - an unmistakeable shift: CIOs just don't have the capex spend they had previously, and are much more reliant on opex to get things done.

They are also looking for suppliers who they are sure are going to be around in a year's time as well, so the emphasis on rock-solid financials has never been stronger. Interest in next-big-thing technology hype is shrinking.

I'm sure many of the buzzwords and phrases we mock (seamless, end-to-end, plug-and-play, robust) started out as benign attempts to express the complexities of IT to a general audience. But since then many of them have turned from rockets into duds that fail to create the impact they once did.

Is this the end then, for the worst excesses of technology marketing speak, which has for too long bedevilled the industry?

If we are lucky, perhaps one - un-mourned - victim of the credit crunch will be a reliance on buzzwords...

Editor's choice - things you should check out on silicon.com this week:

The new silicon.com CIO Insights section is going from strength to strength, so check out the latest CIO interviews.

Tired of queuing up for your fast food? Take a look at the self-service kiosk instead.

And - it's back - the first episode of the second series of 60 Second Pitch is live here.