We've got an apple tree at the bottom of our garden. Because I have the gardening abilities of a small pickax, the base of the tree is surrounded by weeds, many of them big and spikey. The lower boughs I can reach. The fruit there is invariably half eaten, by birds, by maggots. I'm convinced … Continue reading Crap tech industry metaphors: 16 low hanging fruit
Category: Crap metaphors
I am, personally, prone to the odd metaphor. "Rainbow shitting unicorns" is one I use with depressing regularity, usually in reference to a quest to find technologies or skills that patently do not exist. A unicorn is a mythical creature. A rainbow shitting variety doubly so. Unfortunately, it seems that Unicorns now has two meanings … Continue reading Crap Tech Industry Metaphors: 15 Unicorns
The problem with Legacy IT as a metaphor is quite simple: to the whole rest of the world, a legacy is a good thing. If  you're trying to get people to see something as bad, it's really, really important not to hamper your mission by naming it after something good. We might as well call … Continue reading Crap Tech Metaphors: 14 Legacy IT
So, right, imagine that you've got a padlock. And imagine that that padlock has got two keyholes, and can only be unlocked if both keys are used. But the key to lock the padlock is different to the key that is used to unlock the padlock, and whilst you are the only person who has … Continue reading Crap tech industry metaphors: 13 Public & Private Keys
One from Adam one the Twitters... what on earth are people thinking of when they describe a computer programmer as a "ninja"? A software developer who wears pyjamas and a facemask? One who you barely ever see? One who never says anything to anyone? Or, as Adam puts it for "Agile Ninja Coder", one who's dressed … Continue reading Crap Tech Metaphors 12: Ninja Coder
I'm indebted to @DannyGroner from Shutterstock for pointing this one out, and particularly because it's been nagging at me for months. It's a visual metaphor, and it's the use of pictures of bit "coins" to illustrate stories about Bitcoin. Because metal coins are about as far away as you can get from what Bitcoin … Continue reading Crap tech industry (visual) metaphors: 11 Bitcoins
News came out yesterday that the Visify service has been acquired by Yahoo!, and as a result is to be "sunsetted". By that, they mean turned off, shut down or stopped - take your pick. A dreadful metaphor, a software equivalent to "downsized", "right-sized" or "let go". Let's be honest, a sunset is something that … Continue reading Crap tech industry metaphors: 10 Sunsetting
The term dashboard has irritated me for a long while. I'm of the school of thought that if you try to make complex things really simple, you've probably made them stupid too. Complexity and ambiguity is the way of the world in which we live, and boiling down multi-faceted management information into a couple … Continue reading Crap tech industry metaphors: 9 the dashboard
I'm not a big fan of sporting metaphors in business. They're basically meta-metaphors for war. And the hockey stick one took me a long time to get my head around because of other cultural differences: in the UK, hockey is a grass-based sport with a stick that has a hook on the end. In … Continue reading Crap tech industry metaphors: 8 The Hockey Stick
Your computer is running slower than usual? Well, "it's running like a dog". Huh? Have you ever tried to outrun an Alsatian? Turns out, much like the old phrase "pot calling a kettle black", there's a bit that's been lost at the end along the way... in the case of slow things it's the … Continue reading Crap Tech Industry Metaphors: 7 Running like a dog
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