Press Releases: The Good, Bad, and Informative

Since there are awards for just about everything else, my guess is that there are annual awards for press releases. Multiple categories, of course, ranging from the stupid to the sublime.

Don't get me wrong. Good press releases are, in fact, very useful and it takes real talent to write good ones. There needs to be lots of hard information. Enough use of buzz words to catch your attention. A minimum of self-serving congratulations. Good quotes. Who to contact. One page in length. That kind of stuff. In all likelihood, there's a checklist or forumula for writing them and, assuming that press release writers might stumble across this missive, there's every chance someone might share that forumla with us. If I had my druthers, like Dragnet's Jack Friday, I'd ask for "just the facts ma'am." But that's probably asking for too much.

For instance, I have to hand it to IBM's press release writers who generally do a good job. Certainly in a recent spate of press releases they hit, if not home runs, at least doubles and triples in the headlines alone. "Reduces Costs, Improves Access". Not bad. "Breakthrough Technology". Good. "Diverse, Distributed Environments." Suggests hard information to come. "Grid Computing Ecosystem." Ditto.

However, once you get into the press releases themselves, it's time to go to work, separately that chaff from that wheat. "... first-of-its-kind encryption technology and services that deliver the world's first enterprise-class solutions for securing consumer and corporate data privacy." "...unsurpassed levels of security" and "history-making." On the edge of over the top, but acceptable.

Other press releases also make use of the superlative. "New software," "transform," "dynamic," "more efficient," "less power and space,"reduces complexity" and the like.

When all the wheat and chaff are separated, what it comes down to is that IBM made some interesting announcements. The company announced:

• It is offering encryption on tape drives (yes, tape drives are still used by a lot of enterprises for a lot of good reasons). According to IBM, early measurements show no appreciable degradation to performance during the reading and writing of encrypted data. Encryption in the drive also allows data compression, reducing potential impact on the media, and the encryption-enabled tape drive can also process non-encrypted workloads.
• New software that lets clients move their existing technology infrastructures into dynamic, virtualized environments for use in grid computing environments by extending the capabilities of its Tivoli Workload Scheduler to virtual computing environments -- automatically clustering, scheduling and managing different types of workloads across a virtualized environment.
• A Grid Ecosystem program to help IBM Grid Business Partners in building skills, offerings and opportunities related to grid computings.

All in all, this is pretty interesting stuff and the press releases don't necessarily stand in the way of figuring this out. That alone probably is worth an award or two.

Posted by Jon Erickson at 08:56 AM  Permalink