I'm not big on beating up former employers or their employees, but there has been one bit of silliness coming from an ex-employer that I think says quite a bit and worthy of speaking about.
Open Text is in the Enterprise Content Management business, which is to say they are a solution that is begging for a problem to fix (its a very good solution, by the way, as long as you have a problem it can solve). They are also a company that is quite greedy about the markets they want to get into, believing that ECM encompasses everything -- and by the strict interpretation of ECM they are correct.
However, in a classic example of NOT knowing your market but wanting to be a part of a market, Open Text has embraced Web 2.0 as some sort of technology they are connected with. Now, Web 2.0 is both technology and a concept; the technology is interesting and has allowed a new paradigm of computing to exist -- to whit, mashups. However, that technology is built around a philosophy, and that philosophy is nearly the antithesis of ECM -- it is open, unmanaged, anonymous, and unaccountable. How does a company that is built on "Records Management" and accountability embrace that? With a bunch of marketing of course! Enter in an exec's off-hand phrase "Candy and Asprin" that made people laugh and, well, there was no stopping it. White papers were written, blogs started, in fact nearly an entire division was built up over the notion of "Candy and Asprin"--hinting that Open Text is some sort of buffer of sanity, the Asprin to Web 2.0's Candy.
Now, my problems with this are many:
Asprin does NOT fix anything (well, perhaps it helps as a low-dose blood thinner); it does almost the opposite of fixing, it masks a problem (hopefully long enough to fix itself but) possibly so well that the problem gets much worse. Is that really the image OT would want to project? So, using poetic license is fine and a time-honoured approach to marketing, however this one is so egregious I find it embarassing. Enter problem number two
The phrase was said by an exec, so it must be good ... or so many people might assume but more to the point, so the culture of an organization says. In Open Text as in many (dare I say most?) organizations, few are willing to disagree with an executive, it is seen as too risky to one's career. In my experience and opinion, that is not an accurate representation of a company nor most executives (there are exceptions of course!) but it is the perception of many people and perception is more important than reality. If OT had wanted to really test the "Candy and Asprin" phrase, they should have ensured that nobody knew it was first uttered by an exec.
It is just a phrase, it is not a capability but a desire expressed as a capability. In the true art of marketing, this utterly meaningless phrase provides the ability to obsfuctate the reality (that neither OT nor anybody else knows how to tame the masses) while adding to the growing illiteracy of the population.
Like a sunami, once unleashed such a phrase is hard to stop -- the narcissistic corporation can't and won't look beyond it's own navel and stop it, no matter if there is somebody willing to say something or not.
Unfortunately for Open Text, there is nothing behind the phrase; very little "thought leadership" and because the execs haven't a clue about Web 2.0 (exces of large corporations are NOT tech savvy, they only like to believe themselves to be, many are actually technophobes and damn few are extroverted enough to actually be a part of what's current. They all were "hip" in their day, but then forgot that their day was yesteryear), they don't understand just how inappropriate it is. Candy and Asprin -- I need an asprin everytime I see that phrase, and a barf-bag everytime I see another Open Text employee spouting it as if it made some sort of sense. Sigh, and that used to be my job :-)
