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The Red Badge of Web Services

Every middling high school student knows the trick: you've been asked to write a three page book report on the Red Badge of Courage. You have not read the Red Badge of Courage. The night before the book report is due, you read the first couple pages of the book, and sit down to write:

The Red Badge of Courage is a book about the Civil War by Stephen Crane. It was written during the Civil War era and the book discusses many important issues about the civil war, none more important than courage, and the red badge that goes with it. One of the main characters is Henry Fleming. Henry is a young man living in the Civil War era, and the author, Stephen Crane, introduces him in this book in order to discuss the central issue: is there a badge of courage, and is it really a badge or more of like, say, a shield, and is it even red, or is it perhaps one of the other colors of the rainbow, or maybe even a combination of colors that people might not even have considered during the era (the Civil War Era) in which this book was written? Thus, the title, The Red Badge of Courage .....

You can go on like this for about three pages, but once you graduate from high school, no more of that nonsense, right? WRONG. Take a look at any ghost-written business article in a trade publication or a major online website today, and you will see just such nonsense, but with more acronyms and some fancier words. The competition for the worst such article of 2004 is over, however, and the winner is this ridiculous piece of drivel on the topic of web services. You don't need to go read it, I'll break it down for you.

First of all, the author is Daniel Foody, the CTO of a company called Actional, which makes something or other that sounds pretty useless to me. I'm sure they'll do very well.

Here's the deal: The author of the piece is probably not really Daniel Foody. The author is somebody who either works at actional's pr agency or actional's internal marketing group. That person does not get to put their name on the article, because that person isn't important enough, and couldn't possibly write some of the amazingly informative sentences that, say, a man like Daniel Foody could come up with. By the way, do you think it's "food-y" or "foot-y"? I really wish I knew the answer to that. Ok, where were we.

The title of this article is "finding the web services sweet spot". I will tell you right now that the article proceeds to ignore its title in full. If Daniel Foody's ghost writer proceeded to write a film review of "Escape from Witch Mountain" or a lengthy treatise on the padded bra, the article would have more to do with its title than it does now. Typical.

The topic sentence in the article is "When I tell customers that my company does Web services management, the question I often hear is, "So, what do you mean by Web services management?"

Uh oh, that's not good, when he tells his customers what his company does, they respond by saying "huh?". He is so proud of this, it's his lead sentence in the article. Why did I continue reading? because I knew with an opening like that, we might have an early winner of the 2004 Dick Costolo Memorial Red Badge of Courage Business Article Book Report Award. And it turns out, I was right. The article is riddled with idiotically crafted paragraphs like this:

In a world where the way people design, build and install applications remains constant, there is a clear separation between the roles of application servers and systems management tools: Application platforms run the applications; systems management tools make sure that the applications are running well. Application platforms are used by developers; systems management tools are used by operators. The two camps rarely cross paths. In a status quo world, what then happens to pure-play Web services management companies? In this world, consolidation is inevitable.

Three of the four sentences in this one paragraph start out with a variation of the Action Movie Trailer opening, "In a world..." (you know, as in, "in a world where good is evil...." and so forth). But the FUNNY thing about the paragraph is that the first three sentences do not lead to the conclusion AT ALL. It's easier to see the flaw if you boil this paragraph down to it's functional equivalent:

in a world where blue is green, blue is used by people, and green is used by dogs. In this world, what happens when french fries are made? In this world, consolidation is inevitable

That's basically the exact same paragraph, tightened up a bit. This is really good stuff and my high school english book report teacher would be very very proud. Are you getting bored yet? oh man, just think of the poor bastard that actually had to write this for Daniel Foody.

Ok, we better just take a quick look at the pull-quotes that the editors have highlighted to see what the real point of the article is. Here's one of the last ones that Daniel basically says is his conclusion:

Coordinating in-network control across heterogeneous projects requires a careful blend of functionality drawn from both systems management and application platforms

Holy Fucking Shit. Imagine if you read that, and you thought, "how cool". Just try to put yourself in those shoes for a second. Imagine reading those words I just pasted and saying to yourself, "Genius!". No? Can't do it? Course not. Now imagine reading that sentence and thinking: "I can't believe somebody turned that in for their business article book report project". Exactly. We have a winner.

Note: I have no idea who Daniel Foody is, I don't know anything about the company Actional, and I'm sure Daniel could beat me up if he met me on the street. Just about anybody can. I'm sure that if anybody from actional ever read this (unlikely), the only negative result is that the person who actually wrote the article would be upset. Daniel Foody would go on telling his customers "his company does web services management" and by-lining more nitwit articles about web services. I'll take comfort in the notion that I know a lot of people who ghost-write these kinds of articles, and they all know just how stupid these things are, but they do it for the hard cash, and as you can see, it's pretty easy to slap these things together. They practically write themselves. Because when you don't actually have to say anything, one word or phrase is as good as another.

Posted by Dick at January 31, 2004 02:41 PM | TrackBack