Lucy Kellaway is a brilliant and entertaining writer for the Financial Times whose article was published in Business Day today and there are further details below.
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Lucy Kellaway is a brilliant and entertaining writer for the Financial Times whose article was published in Business Day today and there are further details below.
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Lucy focuses on the use and meaning of a number of words, including: together; create, amazing, user experiences, supercharge, entire, benefit, partners and family.
Business Day kindly allows me to publish extracts with a link to Business Day itself.
“Together, we will create amazing user experiences that supercharge the entire Android ecosystem for the benefit of consumers, partners and developers. I look forward to welcoming Motorolans to our family of Googlers”.
“These 32 words were last week repeated uncritically in newspapers all over the world, but no one seems to have stopped to wonder: what on earth was he (Larry Page) on about?”
For example: this is one of the words discussed by Lucy
“Family. If Google is a family, is Larry Page the father? In that case he’s gone a bit over the top in having 29000 kids of his own at Google and now adopting a further 19000. That’s even more than Angelina Jolie. The point about families is you can’t choose them, you share towels and toothbrushes, you look like them, you love them and hate them and are pretty much obliged to have Christmas dinner with them — none of which applies to Googlers or Motorolans. The family metaphor is sound on one thing: when another family is acquired by marriage the stepchildren are guaranteed to hate each other”.
Dreadful 1950s sci-fi B movie
“On Twitter a few people squirmed at Motorolans and Googlers. “Is this some dreadful 1950s sci-fi B movie?” someone tweeted. Otherwise Page’s statement slipped down easily enough. At first sight, it appears to be more or less in English, with no leveraging or scaling or reaching out. However, on closer study it turns out to be devoid of any meaning: I have been trying to translate it into simpler language, but can’t find anything to grab hold of”.
Clichés
“The reason it slips down so easily is that if you ignore words like “the” and “we”, the cliché content is close to 100%. Indeed, he has jammed so many into such a tight space that it is worth doing a little unpacking, word by word, to see if some meaning can be found after all”.
“Thinking about these clapped-out business clichés, I’ve had a sudden revelation. You can put them in a different order and the meaning is the same.
Consider this: consumers, partners and developers will together supercharge the entire user experiences to create amazing benefit for the Android family of ecosystems”.