{"id":11663,"date":"2011-01-26T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2011-01-26T07:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/2011\/01\/26\/microspeak-leverage\/"},"modified":"2011-01-26T07:00:00","modified_gmt":"2011-01-26T07:00:00","slug":"microspeak-leverage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20110126-00\/?p=11663","title":{"rendered":"Microspeak: Leverage"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>At Microsoft, <i>leverage<\/i> is not a term of physics whereby a force can be magnified by the application of mechanical advantage. It is also not a term of finance whereby the power of a small amount of money can be magnified by the assumption of debt. In fact, at Microsoft, the word <i>leverage<\/i> isn&#8217;t even a noun. It is a verb: <i>to leverage<\/i>, <i>leverages<\/i>, <i>leveraging<\/i>, <i>leveraged<\/i>, <i>has leveraged<\/i>. Oh, and it has nothing to do with magnification.\n Here are some citations:<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"q\"><p> How do I leverage a SiteMap? <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<blockquote class=\"q\"><p> Allow advertising partners to leverage this resource for providing targeted advertising links. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<blockquote class=\"q\"><p> Leverage existing design to power other designs <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<blockquote class=\"q\"><p> Do we have documents on how Windows 95 can leverage Windows 2000 Active Directory? <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p> At Microsoft, <i>to leverage<\/i> means <i>to take advantage of<\/i>, or in many cases, simply <i>to use<\/i>.\n Verbal use of the word <i>leverage<\/i> appears to be popular outside of Microsoft as well, such as this headline from eWeek: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.eweek.com\/c\/a\/Enterprise-Applications\/How-to-Leverage-IT-to-Speed-RandD-Innovation\/\"> <i>How to Leverage IT to Speed RandD Innovation<\/i><\/a>.<\/p>\n<p> But can you do this: At Microsoft you can leverage people. <\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"q\"><p> Alice, does Bob perform any component-Foo testing? Charles can be leveraged to actually execute tests if Donald can drive him with these asks. Let me know. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p> That snippet was a whirlwind of Microspeak, with the passive form of the verb <i>to leverage<\/i>, plus <i>to drive<\/i> and the plural noun <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/oldnewthing\/archive\/2004\/01\/07\/48304.aspx\"> <i>asks<\/i><\/a>. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>At Microsoft, leverage is not a term of physics whereby a force can be magnified by the application of mechanical advantage. It is also not a term of finance whereby the power of a small amount of money can be magnified by the assumption of debt. In fact, at Microsoft, the word leverage isn&#8217;t even [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[105,103],"class_list":["post-11663","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-microspeak","tag-non-computer"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>At Microsoft, leverage is not a term of physics whereby a force can be magnified by the application of mechanical advantage. It is also not a term of finance whereby the power of a small amount of money can be magnified by the assumption of debt. In fact, at Microsoft, the word leverage isn&#8217;t even [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11663","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11663"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11663\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11663"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11663"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11663"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}