April 1998
April 1998
You canıt sneeze these days without having a press release written about it. Chances are, youıve encountered at least one press release in the past week. Maybe you develop a product or make business decisions that someone within your organization writes about for you, or perhaps you enjoy accessing late-breaking press releases from corporate Web sites. As a journalist, I receive dozens and dozens of press releases daily.
In honor of April Fools, the April issue of DBMS has always had a bit of whimsy tucked away somewhere. This year Iıve decided to incorporate it into a column that may, if you read between the lines, be useful to you. What I propose is a lesson in writing (and, consequently, deciphering) a fully buzzword-compliant press release that offers lots of effective-sounding words but no real information. Like giving a child too much candy to cure a sweet tooth, my hope is that, upon reading this, youıll recoil in terror the next time you encounter these phrases in any real context. Letıs begin.
First, we need a company for our press release: Clara Parkes Inc. (CPI). My company manufactures utensils to help you peel, core, and chop apples. But that wonıt do me any good in a press release. I have to develop an industry statement that will put me immediately at the head of the pack. I must call myself the leading provider (or supplier) of apple manipulation technology. Do I have numbers to back up my claim? Heck no. Keep going. Now we get to what the company does. How about: CPIıs products seamlessly and efficiently provide cross-apple, apple-independent processing for a myriad of apple formats, generating comprehensively peeled, cored, and distributed componentized edible pulp.
Iım writing this press release to announce that the company has merged its three products into one integrated tool. But letıs put it in context. How about: As more organizations move toward a functionality-enabled realtime environment, a greater need for the diversification of preassembled tools emerges. Recognizing the need for one tool that offers streamlined best-of-breed kitchenwide performance for apple processing and management, CPI has assembled a knowledge-enabled product development team whose members participated in a collaborative productization environment. Working in real time, these engineers and developers have repackaged, repurposed, and reparameterized CPIıs offerings into one integrated development toolsuite family, providing an industry-first end-to-end solution for apple processing. To quote myself (itıs always good to include quotes), "By integrating three business-critical products, CPI enhances a tool utilizerıs capabilities and makes these value-adds mission-critical to the realtime enterprise."
Now we can delve into greater detail on the product. A core component of CPIıs suite is CPI Xpert DeCorer (XDC). The product seamlessly provides a flexible dynamic environment that cuisine developers can leverage in order to enable seedless and skinless apple integration. Using XDC, you can cache the core components of the apple within a third-party component receptacle. XDC supports all porous, semi-porous, and non-porous receptacle environments regardless of their underlying functionality, providing for slice-and-dice, drag-and-drop apple processing.
There are no runtime fees associated with XDC. Because it supports both CARBA (cored-apple rotation by agents) and DCAM (distributed cored apple model), you can operate XDC in synchronous one-user environments or implement multiple XDCs in parallel. Each apple is processed within XDC as an independent instance to ensure complete processing. CPI is currently running ACC-C (Apple Coring Council) benchmarks in five different tests designed to test performance with varying apple types, mixed apple environments, multiple users, and varying workloads and apple ripeness.
At this point in the press release, itıs always good to reflect on the companyıs history and how we got here. CPIıs flagship product, introduced in Q1 1997, was DeCorer 1.0, Developer Edition. It allowed basic decoring technology to facilitate the separation of apple mature seed pod core logic from the containing object either before, during, or after processing. This introduced the possibility of embedding an apple either with or without its core, resulting in the de facto industry standard ALE (apple linking and embedding).
In Q2 1997, CPIıs flagship product was rearchitected (without writing a single line of code) into the Enterprise DeCorer 2.0. Version 2.0 featured greater ease-of-use enhancements and a cutting-edge cutting edge, so to speak. While DeCorer 2.0 was significantly refunctionalitized, Parkes (itıs always good to add a personal note) began to see a need for integrated customer-oriented products that would support greater apple manipulation. Responding to this need, in Q3 1997, CPI expanded its offerings with the addition of PeelR, an enhancement-enabled tool for removing the outer layer of the apple while keeping the logic intact. This product, in turn, resulted in the de facto industry standard API (apple peeling interface). And it goes on and on and onı
If, having read this far, you feel compelled to rearchitect your lunch, I will consider my job well done. There is an art to deciphering a press release, and I encourage you to pursue it. I understand that many of you may not be directly responsible for press releases within your organization. However I do encourage you to get involved in the process before too much damage is done. Many of the phrases included in this monthıs column were lifted from real materials that passed through the DBMS offices. Be careful ı yours could be next.