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I’ve been covering technology and computing since the client-server days of the early 1990s. A lot has changed since then. But some things haven’t changed. Not at all.

One of those is the pretentious, unnecessarily complex, buzzword-laden, imprecise-but-precise-sounding language that has plagued the computer industry since I wrote my first story for “UNIX Today!” in 1990, and probably long before that.

Lord, how I loathe it. I’m in favor of using the simplest, shortest, most accurate words possible. Always.

Technology is complex enough without language that — perhaps out of laziness, perhaps purposely — interferes with my twin goals of eliminating excessive complexity and bullshit, in the service of working as a professional understander and explainer. Marketers are certainly guilty of it. So are most PR people. Happily, engineers can usually be trusted to use language more accurately. Unhappily, they rarely write press releases.

John and Todd, the co-founders of GeekWire, have graciously allowed me to vent my spleen each week about the tech industry’s misuse and abuse of language. So here goes.

This week’s worst word: Hyperconvergence

Examples of (mis)usage:

  • “SimpliVity’s OmniCube products offer SMBs and enterprises alike hyperconverged appliances that work for remote offices, high-performance environments and cloud providers,” according to TechTarget. Those damn Smibs, always messing about with their hyperconverged appliances. Like avocado-green mixers??
  • You know, sometimes it’s just not enough to be merely hyperconverged. See the whitepaper entitled “The fourth era of hyperconvergence: superconverged systems.” (Cloudistics). I dunno, though. I think I’d rather be hyperconverged than superconverged. It sounds more powerful. That’s just me, though.
  • There’s also a close relative of hyperconvergence, for those who’d like more words to throw around: “branched converged infrastructure.” (Riverbed).
  • And Gartner talks about “hyperconverged integrated systems.” Because it’s not enough to be hyperconverged when something can also be integrated.

What it means: Apparently there is at least a bit of reality behind the word. As near as I can make out from Gartner’s magic quadrant report this month, it refers to several resources — computing, network and storage  — that are tightly coupled (I think that just means linked together somehow) and that don’t use a storage-area network (grrr . . . wait ’til next week) but rather use some combination of hardware and software for storage.

Why it’s the worst: 

  • It’s unnecessarily long and complicated.
  • It has no commonly understood and clear meaning.
  • It is rarely accompanied by a definition.
  • It obscures rather than explains.

I’ve got the emotional bandwidth to hate other words, so feel free to submit your favorite candidate to tips@geekwire.com. Don’t expect to see it here any time soon, though, because there are plenty of words I’ve already collected that are making me seethe.

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