Posted by: Eric Siegel
Today, my blog entry is simply a cry of anguish, a plea that someone, somewhere, in the dismal, sleep-walking depths of technology marketing departments will listen to my plea — the plea of an engineer, overworked and overwhelmed, who simply wants TO GET SOME HARD FACTS about your product when developing a "short list" of candidates.
Now, I've got money to spend, and you (theoretically) want some of that. Wouldn't it be nice to get my interest? (Yes, I thought so.) So why are you so incredibly clueless when you create your web sites and marketing literature? Do you ever think about your target audience? I'm not a marketing MBA. I'm not a salesrep. I'm an engineer! I tend to be interested in data, not marketroid foam.
But what do you give me in your data sheet? That's right. Stale marketing foam with lots of hot air and almost no little kernels of technical data. Ugh.
Let's pick on <name deleted to protect the guilty> today. Just what, exactly, does their "<whatever> system diagnostic product" do? I'm unable to figure it out from the datasheet. There are four glossy pages, and here are the translations and my comments: (The quotes are real, not reworded or exaggerated, unfortunately.)
>==== Page 1 ====
Point 1: We do it ALL, brother! We provide a "top-down, end-to-end, collaborative lifecycle approach for seamlessly managing, monitoring, triaging, diagnosing and resolving critical problems with applications — in both pre-production and production environments." Wow! AND we also fix cars, feed the cat, make coffee, put out fires, paint walls, manage group meetings, and clean the cat barf off the carpet when the cat food was too cold! [Look, this kind of yammering gets you nowhere; all it does is trigger cynicism. I've heard it all before, and this tells me absolutely nothing about what your product does, technically. Virtually all vendors describe their products using these words. Being the 99th to do so gets you nowhere. There's zero product differentiation, and I don't even know what market you're in; I have NO IDEA what your product does.]
Point 2: "the architectural complexity with composite applications is increasing and makes monitoring, triaging and diagnostics even more difficult if not impossible—sometimes with random outages and no resolution in sight." Your life is miserable and your systems are screwed up. [OK, happy people don't buy stuff; I know. But why waste your entire first page replaying tales of misery? End of page 1, and I still have NO IDEA what your product does! Other than "everything," of course, including that bit about the cat barf.]
==== Page 2 ====
Point 1: Wow! A cramped picture of four console screens, showing...what? Lots o' wiggly graphs and unreadable text! [Seems to be some sort of response time stuff, indistinguishable from 99 other products. I can't pull my usual stunt of reverse-engineering the product to figure out what it does by looking at the console because these graphs are too generic and unreadable.]
Point 2: "...starts with the end-user business process, then drills down into application components and system layers—helping you rapidly resolve the problems that have the greatest business impact." Starts at the top, drills to the bottom, and MAKES YOU HAPPY! [Whoopee! Again, this is how 99 other products are described. My toes are tingling with engineer joy and I'm digging for my boss's wallet — NOT.]
Point 3: This product is "fully integrated" (whatever that means) with our other indescribably delicious products! [Yay! I can buy a whole suite of stuff that does something, although I still don't know what! (Empty my wallet, maybe?) And excuse me if I don't quite believe that "fully integrated" bit. You probably mean that they both run on the same PC, which is why you're so reluctant to add some technical facts here. And now the second page is over, and I still have NO IDEA what your product does...cat barf....etc.]
==== Page 3 ====
Point 1: Hey, yet another unreadable picture of graphs with squiggly lines and unreadable type! [However, they're different from the second page's squiggly lines and unreadable type; I suppose we're making progress.]
Point 2: Remember that this works with our other products. We just told you that on Page 2, but maybe you forgot. [unprintable]
Point 3: "Key Features and Benefits" -- an assortment of technical-sounding terms we marketing copywriters found in the product's instruction manual. We didn't understand them, so we think they're impressive. [For the first time, there's some real information here! Too bad it's so random and disconnected. A lot of it is how the GUI works, but that doesn't tell me what the system itself does underneath the GUI. Where does the data I'm manipulating come from? That's a mystery that this spec sheet never does answer, and so I still don't know the basic type of product I'm dealing with here. Is it an aggregator of SNMP data? Does it have its own probe mechanism? Does it do "dye tracing" with software shims? I have no idea.]
Point 4: We provide services and support to assist you in figuring out what this product is, and we can also do whatever else needs doing in that smoking ruin of a system that you're responsible for. All you need is money, and lots of it. [Oh, boy.]
==== Page 4 ====
We provide product training. And here are some corporate logos. The End. [I still have no idea what this product does, and so I don't know if I should investigate further. I suppose I should call the sales staff, who will doubtless be just as informative as this datasheet. I'm not looking forwards to a few hours on hold, or talking to uninformed, confused, and confusing salesreps. I hope this isn't a preview of the support I'll get if I buy this pig in a poke (or cat in a sack). Maybe I'll just find another vendor...]
==== ====
Get it? ||: please, please, please :|| tell me what your product does, and how it does it, up front! "This product works by inserting software shims between the Java VM and your applications to track all calls and log their arguments, returned values, and response times. With only five percent overhead, it provides complete tracking of each transaction through your production system, which is an invaluable aid to diagnostic technicians...." You see? Not so difficult after all.