Nobody wants a revolution (especially not large financial institutions)

One of my pet peeves, that you see in a lot of software companies, including open source companies, is to describe the product as ‘revolutionary.’ Here’s why this is a bad practice:

• It provides zero information about what the product does or how it is better than alternatives

• It provide no information about the outcome to expect

• It assumes the audience is looking for a massive change. Often, they are not — they want one very specific process to work better. They do not want the whole system blown up. When I think ‘revolutionary,’ that’s what I think — blows up my system.

If you describe your company, your open source project or your commercial product as revolutionary… go back to the drawing board on your messaging.

PS this comes up very often. I just had a call last week where the founder started off introducing the company as “We revolutionize… “ I stopped him and asked WTF he meant, and he started again and said ‘simplify’ instead. Not perfect, but think about how much more information I had with ‘simplify’ than I did with ‘revolutionize.’