The Words Make a Difference
by Michael Dinowitz
Recently, Fusion Authority has been writing articles with a business focus, showing the importance of a side of ColdFusion that few look at – that of building a business and bringing your message forward. This morning, a news release came across our desk that surprised and disturbed us, but after interviewing the company in question, we found that the problem was not so much the statement they made but that the message they thought they were saying was coming off quite differently then they expected. The message in question: ColdFusion is legacy software. What they meant to say was that their product turns older applications written in ColdFusion, such as ColdFusion 5, into more modern, XML/Ajax-based applications. The term "legacy" that they were using was meant to apply to the applications written in ColdFusion, rather than to ColdFusion itself.
The point of all this is that you must pay attention to the message you are bringing forward. Is it what you think you're saying? Can it be interpreted differently than how you're presenting it? Who are you going to piss off if it's taken at face value, even if the face value is not what you expected?
That's what you should bring home from the press release and from our writeup of what the company actually meant and is bringing to the table as a product – which is actually kind of interesting.
Bottom line: Double, triple, quadruple, quintuple-check the words that you're saying and have other people look at them to make sure it's what you think you're saying.
A final note: Ben Forta has given a response to the article in Infoworld (see our link below) and Paul Krill, author of the article and an editor at Infoworld, has suggested that comments be left for him there. Of course, we take comments now as well. :)