njckname2

Hello,

I am a masters student and I have recently started preparing my thesis, I will present my idea and I want to hear your opinions on it. The reason I am asking is because I don't know much about the IT corporate world and my thesis is aimed at it.

So here we go, as the title of this submission suggests, the topic is the influence of buzzwords in the IT industry.

If you go to almost any website that sells an IT product aimed at corporations you will notice a lot of buzzwords, a lot of marketing. My personal opinion, based on brief experience, is that because of this marketing clutter it is difficult for the reader to understand what the software actually does and what it's real features are but of course it makes the product more attractive to the potential (naive/ignorant) buyer. Buzzwords and marketing talk are common in IT so it must mean they work, they generate sales.

What I would set up to do in my thesis is, try and find out how much using buzzwords influences someone's opinion on a software product.

Just to give you an idea, one of the things I could do is, take a a number people who work in IT and ask them to chose between two products that do almost the same thing. One of them, product P1, is described straightforward, putting the emphasis on making it clear what the product's features are(like you would describe it to a friend, but still using adequate/formal language) and the other, product P2, is described pompously, using buzzwords and such. At the end, see which product of the two gets chosen more often, expecting product P2 to be the favourite. I would also ask the ones who chose P2, why they did it, why do they feel P2 is better.

The example above is an unpolished idea, I haven't thought out much detail about how I will do the actual research yet, because I want to find out if my assumptions are valid, which is why I am opening this thread.

So my assumptions are the following: 1. Buzzwords are abundant in the corporate IT world. 2. Buzzwords give a superficial image of a product, making it look modern and powerful without disclosing it's real features and a lot of people fall into this trap.

What do you think, does this have a potential of yielding some interesting results, is it based on reality or just the ramblings of an ignorant(me)? Are my assumptions accurate?

I would be happy to hear especially from people who work in the corporate IT world and deal with this sort of thing.

Thanks!

Hey,

I know there have been talks, blog posts about what I'm about to ask but I've been ignoring them until now so there is a lot I don't know.

Here's what I want to ask you HN, if you have an idea, how do you promote it?

Say Twitter does not exist and you invent it, how do you promote it?

How do you find people who are good at promoting a website?

If I want to tell a forum about my website, I have to compose the text in a manner that will make my product appealing to the potential user and all sorts of things at which I'm bad at.