4 ms·

For the love of God, please tell me what your company does

28 points by kediz 7y ago

kediz 7y ago
Found this under the comment of the cruise post. Pure GOLD
undershirt 7y ago
I think I remember hearing that companies stay elusive about the concrete parts of their business because a simplified description may be easily dismissed too soon. The full context may be hard to explain on paper in our climate of impatience. So necessitating a higher bandwidth conversation to learn about the business allows them to free you from your own prejudices with a realtime description catered to your needs. Infuriating and interesting.
mikhailfranco 7y ago
A related frustrating indirectness gives rise to another popular internet game: Go to the home page of an open source software project then try to discover the (primary) programming language. The result can be given in minutes, or perhaps the number of links followed. In some cases, the only method is to download the zipped src, or click through to the src directory, if it is a code repository.
rramadass 7y ago
This is so True! It is highly frustrating, wastes everybody's time and in general the companies come off as "untrustworthy" since it is clear that they intentionally obfuscate their products/services. I work in the Tech Domain and understand Technology reasonably well. However when i go to the websites of the various Cloud/IoT/AI/ML/BigData/Analytics companies, i am always mystified as to their offerings/USPs. The verbiage, jargon, claims made etc. are so over the top and obfuscatory that you really don't understand what they actually do. The result is that, instead of taking a bet on them, people go with a safer/well-known company a la; "nobody gets fired for buying IBM". Then the company wonders why their product/services don't take off.
dredmorbius 7y ago
Yes, this. Among my earliest popular HN comments, from 2014: Please Forward to Marketing: How to present your products to customers (or would-be customers) https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/27d5xr/please_forward_to_marketing_how_to_present_your/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/27d5xr/please_... (Redrafted into a Reddit post, originally: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7489870 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7489870) I'm thinking customers isn't who these firms are talking to.

28 points by kediz 7y ago

Found this under the comment of the cruise post. Pure GOLD

I think I remember hearing that companies stay elusive about the concrete parts of their business because a simplified description may be easily dismissed too soon. The full context may be hard to explain on paper in our climate of impatience. So necessitating a higher bandwidth conversation to learn about the business allows them to free you from your own prejudices with a realtime description catered to your needs. Infuriating and interesting.

mikhailfranco 7y ago

A related frustrating indirectness gives rise to another popular internet game: Go to the home page of an open source software project then try to discover the (primary) programming language. The result can be given in minutes, or perhaps the number of links followed. In some cases, the only method is to download the zipped src, or click through to the src directory, if it is a code repository.

rramadass 7y ago

This is so True! It is highly frustrating, wastes everybody's time and in general the companies come off as "untrustworthy" since it is clear that they intentionally obfuscate their products/services. I work in the Tech Domain and understand Technology reasonably well. However when i go to the websites of the various Cloud/IoT/AI/ML/BigData/Analytics companies, i am always mystified as to their offerings/USPs. The verbiage, jargon, claims made etc. are so over the top and obfuscatory that you really don't understand what they actually do. The result is that, instead of taking a bet on them, people go with a safer/well-known company a la; "nobody gets fired for buying IBM". Then the company wonders why their product/services don't take off.

dredmorbius 7y ago

Yes, this. Among my earliest popular HN comments, from 2014: Please Forward to Marketing: How to present your products to customers (or would-be customers) https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/27d5xr/please_forward_to_marketing_how_to_present_your/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/27d5xr/please_... (Redrafted into a Reddit post, originally: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7489870 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7489870) I'm thinking customers isn't who these firms are talking to.