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>The word "mosaic" is visual enough to speak to the imagination. Its
>purpose was to get readers--IT managers at telephone companies--to take
>notice of the chaos of their situation, juggling huge 1970s flat-file
>databases written in COBOL with the super-fancy object-relational crazy
>stuff that's coming out now. The "mosaic" metaphor gets readers to see the
>need that the product fills, and it also builds credibility by showing that
>we understand their situation. If I had said, "1970s flat-file databases
>written in COBOL communicating with modern object-relational databases",
>eyes would have glazed over. That does not speak to the imagination, at
>least not as much. "We provide a comprehensive data-sharing solution"
>omits detail by being abstract, and therefore does little to get the reader
>to imagine ways to use our product.
I guess "mosaic" *is* better than "a virtual Yugoslavia of incompatible -
and even hostile - applications forced to talk to each other by the
programming equivalent of NATO air strikes."
--Wayne
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Wayne Douglass phone: 408-542-2139
Verity, Inc. FAX: 408-542-2040
894 Ross Road mailto:wayned -at- verity -dot- com
Sunnyvale, CA 94089 http://www.verity.com
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