Leveraged any clouds lately? Yet more poisonous executive hogwash from Ziff-Davis. But they do get one very important thing right

The literary equivalent of  sleeping potions: this guff may be important, but I’m damned if I can tell. Can you? And does it matter?

I’ll get round to Leveraging the Cloud in a minute.

But first let us gravely contemplate The Great Cloud of Unknowing.

Our world is divided into two parts. One speaks English. The other speaks any one of a number of obscure private languages.

Consider if you will in mournful silence this incomprehensible and savage assault on the tottering bastions of my native tongue.

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Now, that may be manna from heaven to those who understand it. But to everyone else it might as well be 16th century Mandarin.

And you may reply that it doesn’t matter. As long as the select few at whom it is aimed get it, who cares?

It depends on whether you want to make more money or not.

When you sell highly technical gubbins I have found that rewriting it in something as close as possible to English improves results.

That’s because shorter, plainer words make stuff easier to take in. As a result everyone, expert and not quite so expert, understands. And that means your message reaches not just the perfect prospects but quite a few more who could be interested now or later

But one thing Ziff-Davis get 100% right is they are everlastingly at it. They deluge you with stuff.

Very few firms understand how important it is to simply communicate more.  You never know when someone is ready to buy or just seeking knowledge for when they are ready. If you seem to know more, they are more likely to turn to you when they want to buy.

While I’m astride this hobby horse, here’s a classic about The Cloud, also via Ziff-Davis, that got me going. Do you spot what makes it so obnoxious?

The subject line alone made me want to throw up.

It read Re: A Strategic Playbook for the CFO. Then came this.

Let’s start with the heading. Sheer corporate horse-shit.

Then look at the creep in the picture. Straight from The Office.

I know he’s just a model but when these smug bastards stand up in meetings isn’t that the very moment that your life-force drains away? Is that the kind of arse-crawler you’d like to see run over, or what?

By the way, I still don’t know what the bloody Cloud is because nobody has explained it clearly.

But I wish to God it would just go away, leverage itself quietly in some secluded corner of the universe and get all these people to SHUT THE F**K UP about it.