Acronyms soup … A pain in the —aas

I wanted to echo an excellent post from ZDNet's Phil Wainewright about the over-used '2.0', ‘-aaS' and ‘-oriented' monikers.

You may also want to get familiar with an entire alphabet soup of acronyms floating around for on-demand technologies from SaaS Week's Krissi Danielsson.

Why is it that jargon, suffixes and other linguistic contortions are systematically used every time technology is considered to operate in a quicker, smarter, cheaper and more effective way?

Most of these concepts are representing a radical change in the way businesses operate. It is also usually as much about the people, company culture, mindsets and processes as it is about the technology, tools and platforms. Furthermore, most concerned technologies have also been available for a while; sometimes well before these monikers appeared. Is it that we are finally finding innovative ways to use them to their maximum effect?

This is definitely a never-ending issue (remember the ‘.com' and ‘e-' era). The winners will probably be the ones that lead and deliver innovative solutions to solve real business problems and then invent the terms and acronyms to drive understanding of the new concept. Others who just ride the buzz wave once it starts to get popular (because it drives attention and traffic...) will be continually challenged to keep up. These followers are usually the ones broadening and modifying the initial definition so that it applies to them and finally, everyone is using the term that no longer has any useful meaning.