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Another Sign Of A New Bubble: Bringing The Corporate Doublespeak Back
from the and-so-it-goes dept
After the bubble burst, during the backlash, there was plenty of talk about all of the terminology that was used in the bubble. We mentioned some enterprising (read: bored, with no work to do) consultants, who created a little application that would run through your Microsoft Office documents and and highlight the "bull" words. The application is called Bullfighter, and it's still around. However, Clive Thompson (via the folks who created Bullfighter) has discovered that there's now the exact opposite product on the market. That's right, for just $50, you can have a software product that will go through your documents and modify it to add back in meaningless corporate doublespeak (read: bullshit) designed to make the documents sound better. Almost everyone who looks at it assumes it absolutely must be a joke -- but apparently it's quite serious. Still, I have to say on the company's website the customer testimonials surely could use an upgrade using their own software: "I like it, it is a very good software." Really doesn't have much pizazz, does it?
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Well, if it can turn a crappy writer into one that is merely mediocre, it might be worth the money.
- Freed
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Ok, I installed it, tested it, and promptly uninstalled it.
DON'T BUY IT.
Here's what I put on the company's feedback website:
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Whitesmoke kept trying to get to the internet, and saying there was a problem with my internet connection. There is no problem with my internet connection at all, so this brings up two issues:
1) Did you actually put this thing out for business professionals to use with no way to configure a passworded proxy connection?
2) Why on earth would this product need to access the internet anyway? What sort of spyware is now on my system?
Furthermore, this didn't improve my writing, and I think that the suggestions it makes would only serve to degrade my writing. It doesn't look at whole sentences as you advertise, and it merely provides an online thesaurus with tangentially related terms in an attempt to add fluff to whatever is being written. Often the suggestions are grammatically incorrect and do not appear to be sensitive to the actual usage they are suggesting needs work. Cases in point - I ran a recent project status report through whitesmoke to see what it would do with it. Whitesmoke lacks the versatility to even recognize simple two word phrases (like "picking up", "looked over" and "hear back") and offered to correct individual parts of the two word phrase. If I am waiting to "hear back" from a vendor, I'm not waiting to "listen back" as whitesmoke suggested. This product could easily lead to bad writing for the unenlightened.
I also found that opening two separate copies of MS Word rendered whitesmoke impotent. Perhaps that's a feature?
Good idea for marketing flunkies that can't write their own fluff, but poorly executed. It's uninstalled. Don't email me with updates.
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- Freed
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Now I feel like a real schmuck
I just noticed a grammatical error in my diatribe about a grammar checking package. I didn't delete the whole sentence when I was editing, and things are a little awkward there, to say the least.
Don't I feel like a dummy.
- Freed
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Didn't Scott Adams do this already?
There's something very similar that's been on the internet for years now: the dilbert vision statement generator. Ok, so maybe it doesn't convert word documents, but with a vision statement for every other line, it should be pretty close.
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