My last few posts have mentioned the importance of simplicity, so having praised IBM I now feel free to tease them.
A few years ago I went to a conference in Sydney, Australia, and I sat in on a session given by a (US-based) IBM marketeer. He was trying to sell the ease of deployment of some middleware product from IBM, and he kept on stressing the importance of “simplistic solutions” and “simplistic user interfaces”. Never “simple”, always “simplistic”. Most people were polite (and some, I’m sure, never recognized the verbal gaffe), but a few of us had red faces and watering eyes as we tried to avoid the hysterical laughter that threatened to overwhelm us….
Afterwards an Australian colleague asked me if “simplistic” had a different meaning in the US. I often wondered if anyone told the unfortunate speaker of his mistake.