If you’ve been following cyberseraphic, you’ll no doubt know that I work for IBM. Now if you ask any of my past or present colleagues and they’ll agree that I’m Blue through-and-through – my loyalty to the company borders on religious. I mean why else would I stay with a company for 9 years, doing much the same thing (Web), and at the rate that I’m being paid, right? :-)
However, I’m an even bigger language geek, so I ain’t always drinking the company kool-aid (blue, naturally). For example, I once wrote a scathing internal blog post criticising the capitalisation in the brand name for our server range (included for your reading pleasure at the end of this post) and another bemoaning the lack of consistency in pronoun use across the Web site (rather less interesting, and the less said about it the better). But the thing that’s bugging me at the moment is how we call ourselves “IBMers”:
Why I’m an IBMer video
Who was it that decided appendding “-er” to the brand would form a suitable descriptor? If you think about it, the label spelled out would be “International Business Machines-er” (or “International Business Machiner” if I was feeling generous). We’re not the only ones. At Google recently, ex-Late Show host Conan O’Brien made mockery of – that’s right – Googlers.
A long (but hilarious) video of Conan O’Brien’s visit to Google. The bit about “Googlers” is at 1:35.
Is there a grammatical convention that dictates which suffix one should adopt? Like how do we know which one to use for countries, where sometimes you add -an like Australian, American, European and other times -ish such as British, Swedish, etc. If the process is entirely arbitrary then I’d like to add a few suggestions, to help employees and clients alike to classify the many different types of IBMer that they’re likely to come across:
- IBMpath
Used to describe a colleague that takes great pains to show care for yourself and others. Or mutter it under your breath so that it sounds sounds like sociopath.
- IBMish
These guys are the ones who have been in the company for a long time, and resist any attempts to adopt new business techniques or technologies. They prefer to continue in their backward ways.
- IBMling
The corporate under-class, downtrodden and unappreciated.
Alice: “The client is upset that their project went over budget. What shall we do?”
Bob: “Don’t worry, I’ll send one of my IBMlings.”
Alice: “But they’ll eat him alive!”
Bob: “That’s OK, he just spends the whole day looking at Facebook anyway.”
Alice: “Ah, no worries then.”
- IBMard
These folks have usually come into the business through an acquisition, or else they’ve been with another company for some length of time before starting at IBM. Try as they might, they Just Don’t Get It. Regardless of how many times you’ve explained it, or how much training you put them through, they refuse to do things the IBM way. Who cares that it’s faster, easier and cheaper if it doesn’t require 20 levels of management sign-off? That’s just how we do it in IBM.
- IBMoid
Strange creatures that manage the deeply arcane aspects of the business. Often heard speaking in alien language with phrases that resembles English, but are completely unintelligible, like “all hands meeting”, “business as usual” and “drop-dead date”.
How does your company refer its employees?
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Here’s the blog post that I mentioned earlier…
Less than x-cited (originally posted sometime in 2006)
Some of you might have missed this little tidbit in the latest issue of A/NZ Newslinks, but STG is changing the name of eServer xSeries to IBM System x™. In most regards, I’m quite happy that they’ve finally dropped the very awkward eServer branding (the capitalisation of it never really fit very well with that of the other products, e.g. ThinkPad, ThinkCentre, IntelliStation, etc.) however I still have some reservations about retaining the lowercase “x”.
Granted, IBM now has to differentiate itself from the brands that it sold off to Lenovo, but maybe there should have been a move towards integrating other IBM product and service offerings into a single, consistent messaging (or naming) scheme. For example, take the Lotus software range, where each application has a functional, descriptive name: e.g. Lotus Learning Management System or Lotus Web Conferencing.
Where the “e-” prefix has stopped being fashionable, and everything “i-” is slowly being absorbed by the Apple marketing juggernaut that is the iPod, the adoption of plain-speaking names should be applauded. Imagine, if instead of “IBM System x” we simply had a range of “IBM Servers” with family groups such as:
- IBM Mainframe Servers
- IBM Enterprise Application Servers
- IBM Small to Medium Business Server
… or something to that effect. Customers would be able to differentiate our product offerings immediately, without having to wade through various blurbs and summaries about the product range (does the average Joe even know who an iSeries is aimed at?) I know that my thinking doesn’t take into account the probable multi-million dollars worth of research into marketing, branding and customer research, and far be it from me to suggest that I could have done a better job (or come up with a better name), but I still feel compelled to say that I’m disappointed with “System x” – a name with such forced mediocrity that it can’t even afford to capitalise the “x” for fear of seeming pretentious or rude.
A bit over a year ago I had a crazy idea: if I start writing book reviews and attach affiliate links to Book Depository at the end of each one, people will buy them and I’ll get rich off commissions! Thus GeekReads was born. Like all harebrained schemes born of greed, the idea fell flat and destroyed any delusions I had of blogging my way to fame and fortune.
