Floppy - Any 20th
century western child would connect this word with "bunny",
beanie baby and the like. Double entendre specialists may make other
associations. But in the world of IT this is a completely rigid little
square item used for storing small amounts of data.
Desktop - This used to be where
you put your pens, papers and family photographs. It was possible to
spill tea on it. The new IT "desktop" travels with you
wherever you go and appears on your computer screen. This is very
useful as you no longer have a desk, and your attempts to humanise the
office are now in a sad trolley that you trundle around. For the IT
manager, a "corporate desktop project" is a key component in
recentralising power.
Network - For most managers and
sales personnel this conjures up images of talking to people, eating
and drinking. Otherwise it is the communications glue that holds
organisations together. Networks have mixed blessings: for example,
they enable you to have email, but prevent you from accessing it for
days on end. Possibly for 10% of the time the second letter of
"network" should change to another vowel, like
"o".
Microsoft - To most of us
consumers this is that nice Mr Gates and his company, who have brought
order and standards to a chaotic world. But mentioning
"Microsoft" in a meeting of IT personnel can be like
mentioning "Macbeth" in a theatre. Microsoft is to blame for
all the evils in the IT world. You can measure an IT person's
antipathy to Microsoft by the spittle intensity that comes with the
second syllable. Far better to have something that doesn't work so
well than go Microsoft. Like Ne......
Portals - In science fiction
these are gateways to other parts of the space/time continuum - to
adventure, romance and danger. In real life, they are the way in to
online shopping malls.
Real time - On the one hand, an
ontological paradox. On the other, a misuse of words to describe more
or less contemporaneous online communication. "Real" time is
really no more real than "real" numbers are. This
highlights the problem of entrusting areas of linguistic innovation to
people who think and write in numbers and squiggles.
Upgrade - Upgrade is a word
developed by IT spin doctors. All IT consists of patched up
combinations of workarounds, however slick it's made out to be. This
is because all IT is built on a previous generation of
seat-of-the-pants development that didn't work right the first time.
By the time an upgrade has been developed to work with all other
relevant software and hardware, new versions of everything else are
being developed to work with older versions of the software you have
just redesigned. The result is a field day for IT consultants who have
to make the incompatible compatible.
Collaborative working - This is
all about achieving impressive improvements in productivity and
unleashing new innovative energy in an organisation. It is done by
setting up new ways of sharing and processing work using electronic
networks. So you go to your IT manager to talk about workflow, cross
departmental teams, collaborative forums, innovation schemes etc. He/she
responds in terms of LANs, gigabits, Exchange servers, Ethernet and
routers. At this point collaborative working begins its descent into
trench warfare. Those guys at Babel were singing in harmony compared
to this.
