Tuesday, August 14, 2007

Product Announcement Template

I came across a development tool product announcement today that was so perfectly cliched, I was compelled to make a template from it. "Will abstract for food" is the hand-lettered cardboard sign I would hold if I was out of work, so I'll share this one:

[Product name] is an innovative, high performance [product area] framework designed to accelerate your development while, at the same time, providing your application with a solid foundation based on best practice domain-driven design patterns. With features like [buzz-word feature from a competing product], [synonym for high performance], [feature that would be useful in most software products, such as checking user input] and [feature that any reasonable product in the category needs], it allows you to focus your efforts where they should be: Solving business problems and not writing tedious infrastructure and "plumbing" code.
Now, for the original, less the product name (we call this partial evaluation):
[Product name] is an innovative, high performance .NET domain model and O/R mapping framework designed to accelerate your development while, at the same time, providing your application with a solid foundation based on best practice domain-driven design patterns. With features like convention-over-configuration, fast data access, model validation and data binding, it allows you to focus your efforts where they should be: Solving business problems and not writing tedious infrastructure and "plumbing" code.
Sigh. Nothing particularly compelling in this announcement, unless you just woke up from a debilitating illness and didn't know what was on the market and needed something to mention at this afternoon's meeting.

The only other funny thing is the choice of the word "tedious." Tedious is the word that comes to mind when you don't use a framework at all, and you keep wondering "isn't there a way to abstract this out so I don't need to write almost the same 5 lines thousands of times?" But it's a good choice of word for selling anything automated, as "tedious and error-prone" is the accepted justification for the effort of writing a program to abstract the process in question.