Every industry and technical discipline has its own vocabulary. Although characterized by many as techno-babble, such technical vocabulary serves a valuable purpose in that it is often needed to introduce and describe truly new concepts. Relatively immature, rapidly evolving, and technology driven, the information processing industry’s technical vocabulary has grown at an exponential rate. Unfortunately, much of this growth has come from hardware and software vendors seeking to gain competitive market advantage for their newest whiz-bang technology, industry publications seeking to boost their circulation, or technology analysts wishing to be the first to identify the latest breakthrough.

As a consultant, I should welcome this veritable blizzard of techno-babble. After all, the more confused the consumers of this technology are, the greater the need for so-called experts to sort the wheat from the chaff. But as a developer seeking to deliver system solutions I find that the “noise” ratio of hype to truth is becoming a serious obstacle in identifying truly innovative technologies that can be applied to real-world problems.