Carolyn Duffy Marsan wrote a seemingly innocent column, 12 words you can never say in an office. The title of the article suggest she was about to update George Carlin's memorable list, Seven Dirty Words You Can't Say On Television.
Office workers' reaction to the column were nearly as negative - and extensive - as those of the FCC when George did his monologue in the early 1970s. Visit the *seven* pages of comments and you'll find rebuttals regarding most of the terms Carolyn claims are passe. You'll also find plenty of comments questioning poor Carolyn's academic pedigree, her competency as writer/editor, and the competency/credibility of her journalism in general:-)
Why all the fuss? Carolyn made the not-so-career-ending mistake of tinkering with tech terms. Many people who work in or with technology value accurate terminology, but asimportantly, they are skeptical of claims they feel are uncorroborated. Tell someone who routinely uses his corporation's intranet that he's using a portal and he may object. (Actually, *they* may object. The comment thread wherein indignant techies debate not only the original version of Carolyn's post, but the editorial rewrite is an endearing and revealing aspect of the column.)
Carolyn puts readers on notice: an extranet must now be called an VPN. Net and security admins posted comment after comment describing the differences between the two. I'm confident that only limits to comment submissions will prevented someone from enumerating and describing the several VPN technologies and protocols his company uses.
A problem with declaring a technology term obsolete is that technology adoption has a long tail. IT staff at a company that is still wrestling with VOIP call quality and security is probably not easily convinced that the PSTN is obsolete. A webcasting company doesn't want to hear that only RSS feeds qualify as push technology any more than an application service provider wants to put all his SEO budget into terms including "cloud".
Just about every word or phrase Carolyn mentions - Intranet, Extranet, ASP, PDA, surfing the web, push technology Internet telephony, weblog, thin client, world wide web, long distance call- is debated or her claim is debunked. Well, no one debates that RBOC is dead, so partial score there.
Earlier, I called this a not-so-career-ending editorial. In fact, I'll speculate that Network World is delighted with it. The editorial stimulated discussion. More importantly for Network World, it attracted visitors who left comments which created additional pages which created real estate for advertising.
What's next for Carolyn? Perhaps "15 ways to obfuscate the US health care debate"?