January 5th, 2010

Microspeak: Engagement

Meetings are so passé. You no longer have a meeting with a customer; you have an engagement:

I have a customer engagement tomorrow and they have a question surrounding Feature X.

Note that this use of the phrase customer engagement is different from the process known as customer engagement. The process is an ongoing interaction, a long-term activity to build customer loyalty.

The author of the above sentence is not using it in the process sense (because you don’t have “a” customer engagement; rather, a meeting is one component of the overall process of customer engagement). Nope, the author is just trying to sound cool.

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Raymond has been involved in the evolution of Windows for more than 30 years. In 2003, he began a Web site known as The Old New Thing which has grown in popularity far beyond his wildest imagination, a development which still gives him the heebie-jeebies. The Web site spawned a book, coincidentally also titled The Old New Thing (Addison Wesley 2007). He occasionally appears on the Windows Dev Docs Twitter account to tell stories which convey no useful information.

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