At Microsoft's consulting divisions, customer visits are a part of the job. A shorthand has developed to describe how formally dressed you should be at the meeting with the customer. (I leave it as an exercise to develop the comparable attire for women.) Note: This Microspeak entry was submitted by a colleague from the UK, so it may be pecu...
The more conventional definition of represent is along the lines of "to act as a proxy for". An attorney represents his or her client in court. Your legislator represents you in the assembly. A token on a board represents your position in the game. At Microsoft, the word represent takes on a stranger meaning. Here are some usages inspired by actu...
At training sessions, you don't participate in team-building exercises. No, that's old-fashioned terminology, the sort of thing those old stodgy Web 1.0 dinosaurs would say. The new word is teaming. Note: This Microspeak entry was submitted by a colleague from the UK, so it may be peculiar to the UK dialect of Microspeak. Pre-emptive clev...
As I noted in an earlier entry of Microspeak, the real estate department here has their own weird jargon. Today's phrase is "delivering space": Listed below is the schedule for delivery of space over the next twelve months. Translation: "Listed below is the schedule for when new office space will become ready for use over the next twelve months....
I'm particularly fascinated by Microspeak terms which nobody actually knows the meaning of. You can defend jargon by saying that it's a shorthand way of talking in order to improve communication, but if nobody actually knows what it means, the in order to improve communication part is completely turned on its head. The Microspeak that allegedly all...
The long pole is the part of the project that is on the critical path due to its length. For example, if you have a project that consists of three independent sub-projects, then the sub-project with the longest completion date is the long pole. The etymology of this term is simultaneously obvious yet hard to pin down. Intuitively, the long pole i...
I hate management-speak. Here's an example from an internal Web site. The purpose of this Web site is two-fold. Wow, let's look at the first stated purpose. It goes on for so long and uses blatant management-speak such as "facilitate" and "leverage" that by the time it's over, I forget how the sentence started. Going back and reading it...
In a conference call with investors last year, investor relations general manager Colleen Healy described the effect of business editions of Windows thus: As we shared with you previously, Windows Vista business generates over five times the pricing uplift over Windows Vista Home Basic than does Windows Vista Home Premium. Also known as profit....
Here are a few citations. On a list of activities: Presumably they mean bring on board. What makes this particularly interesting is that they didn't convert a noun to a verb; they converted a prepositional phrase to a verb, demonstrating once again the malleability of the English language. Here's a snippet from a blog post which seems to use...
I have only one citation, so it may not be proper Microspeak. With all of these features covering the scenario end to end, we wanted to create a new center of value. I still don't know what it means.
