By reading one press release after another from various players in the IT industry (none of which, amazingly, contained the word “sorry”) about different kinds of stupid blunders unexpected features, I got the distinct feeling that we seriously need to regulate the corporate PR departments a bit more.

Here`s my first suggestion…:

Terms that should be banned from press releases and advertising by the IT industry…:

  1. “limited number”

    As used in: “Only a limited number of customers have been affected by the problem…”

    My suggestion: Replace limited with finite. Closer to the truth, but still implying that at least one customer didn`t have his OS completely destroyed by a careless blunder in the product.

  2. “up to”

    As in “… bandwidth of up to 16 Gbit/s…”

    Suggestion: replace “up to xxx” with “you will never see xxx, but we will bill you for that anyway.”

  3. “committed to”

    As in, “… we are committed to continuously improving the security of our products…”

    Suggestion: Replace “committed to xxx” with “we couldn`t care less about xxx, but we would never be caught saying that in a press release.”

If you want to participate in this kind of bullshit bingo a bit, here`s some suggested reading:

Any more suggestions? Feel free to post a comment…