Buzzword Bingo 2.0
AT LAX, waiting on a plane to Atlanta, I bought a book, "The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century" by Thomas L. Friedman. Just a few pages into it, and I closed the book cover in disgust. The writing was great, his points excellent. It was just one term that made me think, "Can I NOT get away from the numeric lemmings?"
The term was "Globalization 3.0."
Sigh. I can't seem to escape those who attempt to create buzz around the recent crop of single-precision decimals propped up against a term.
Web 2.0. Enterprise 2.0. SOA 2.0.
I can't agree with Joel more. Oh, Lord... not being satisfied with creating confusing and ambiguous terms with numbers attached, they have already started increasing the numbers as well! Web 3.0?!?
See the trend? Find a term, and bump the major revision number. Watch the analysts. If necessary, repeat.
I started racking my brain trying to pinpoint where this recent trend of taking ambiguous terms and increasing the major revision number started. This really has gotten bad in the past 8 months. I can't seem to think of another instance of this phenomenon occurring earlier, except the old joke about "Upgrading from Girlfriend 6.0 to Wife 1.0".
Hmm... so that's all there is to it? Find a word, give it a number, and bask in the adolations of analysts and uninspired media wonks? Brilliant!
I hereby lay claim to the following buzzwords and future versions of those buzzwords, in advance.
- Coding 2.0
- Development 2.0
- Knowledge 2.0
- Information 2.0
- Paradigm 2.0
- Marketplace 2.0
- Interconnection 2.0
- Infrastructure 2.0
- Interactive 2.0
In fact, this looks like the makings of Buzzword Bingo 2.0.