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Words to Avoid: Cloud, Serverless, Microservices and More

Servers, services and daemons

The inside of a server
There's always a physical server, it's not "up there" (in the "cloud") but down here and it's definitely not "serverless"



Summary: The marketing industry is hijacking press coverage and journalism has turned into a laughable mash-up of buzzwords; technical people ought to push back

IN THE context of the EPO and USPTO we often complain about propaganda terms such as "intellectual property rights" (these aren't property, legally and technically speaking, and these are not rights either but more like franchises) and also buzzwords that are used to promote software patents in Europe and sometimes in the US too. We talk about words like "smart", "IoT", "AI" and so on.



"People aren't as gullible as marketing/PR departments want them to be and they're willing to push back against bad vocabularies and semantic trickery."Buzzwords like these are a very big problem because they deliberately distort the debate to make bad ideas and sometimes human rights violations (like grotesque privacy infringements) seem acceptable if not "hip".

I wrote the following yesterday:

https://twitter.com/schestowitz/status/1081556571946131456

The comments there add more examples to the same effect. People aren't as gullible as marketing/PR departments want them to be and they're willing to push back against bad vocabularies and semantic trickery. Last year we wrote on numerous occasions that patent examiners must learn to reject buzzwords like "cloud" or "AI"; many old things are nowadays being spun as novel because "cloud" or because "AI", never mind how meaningless those terms often turn out to be.

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