Quality Bar: The remarkably flexible level of acceptability in a product. Tends inexorably to drop as the pressure of an impending milestone, content freeze, or other deadline builds.

Ramp up: Technical term appropriated for general usage, meaning to gear up, to reinforce, and, in a sense, to gird oneself for greater effort. Can be applied externally, as in ramping up resources for a new project, or internally, as in "I’ve got to ramp up to deal with these Web issues."

Random: Not so much an objective description of unpredictable or accidental factors as a pejorative term to describe poorly reasoned analysis. Antonym: Crisp.

Randomize: To distract or throw off track by constantly changing course or emphasizing irrelevant details. "Marketing randomized him by shifting the goalposts every week."

Real estate: Room, primarily on a computer screen. "Is there enough real estate for all these design elements?"

Reality Distortion Field: When a team deludes itself that it can achieve impossibly tight milestones and solve insurmountable tech problems, and derides any nonbelievers as visionless pessimists and cynics.

Reorg: As the term suggests, a displeasing abbreviation for "reorganization." A frequent phenomenon at Microsoft, where organizational structures are revamped regularly, at great cost to productivity and soon-to-be-former "human resources," to create the impression of flexibility in what now is necessarily a slow-moving corporate leviathan.

Repurpose: Fairly useless neologism meaning to redesign for use in another context. Ex: "We’ll repurpose the reviews in the core product to use on the website."

Resonate: Appeal, strike. "Let’s see how this plan resonates with marketing."

Revved: A needless abbreviation of revised.

Robust: In a vaguely Rubens-esque sense, a program or piece of code that’s fully fleshed-out, strong, brimming with health so that bugs can’t survive. Increasingly applied to more nebulous, theoretical concepts (ideas, plans, specs, etc.).

Self-Toast: To fatally contradict yourself. Extension of the fairly widespread mainstream usage of "toast" as "history," "dead," "burned out."

Showstopper: A function, object, or issue important enough to jeopardize a ship date or schedule in order to correct or include. In other words, a really big bug.

Sim-shipping (or Simshipping): To ship a product’s PC and Mac versions at the same time. A rare accomplishment.

Skillset: As implied, a set of skills possessed by a "human resource."

Slipping: Euphemism for abjectly failing to hit a deadline.

Spec: Probably not a pure Microsoftism. Used as both noun and verb: as verb, to analyze a field of information or database prior to the commencement of a project; as noun, the analysis of that information. Also, a preliminary plan or prospectus. "Ed will spec the song clips to see which ones we need to swap out"; "Ed, have you finished the song-clip spec yet?"

Stake In The Ground: A somewhat grandiose, even gory core marketing term, signifying the area or market segment where Microsoft plans to place its hoped-for monopoly. At the proper juncture, the stake is removed and buried in the heart of the competition.

Take Inventory: As in "take inventory of the situation." As implied, to assess or analyze.

Take-away: Also takeaway. Not, as might be suspected, food to go, but impressions gleaned from a meeting or message. "My take-away from his e-mail was that he wasn’t ready to drill down yet."

Taxonomy Of Options: A greatly murkier (and therefore infinitely preferable) way of saying "range of choices."

Three-Year Plan: A projective near-future business plan. At Microsoft, a new three-year plan is devised at least once a year.

TLA: Three-letter acronym. A widespread general software/computer-boffin term, but refined to a way of life (if not a metalanguage) at Microsoft. See BOOP (an FLA, actually), EOD, EOM, OOF.

Touch Skin: Same basic meaning as facemail (q.v.) or face time. A meeting arranged to counter the austerity of communicating in cyberspace. "We flew that guy to Redmond just so we could touch skin."

Traction: Increasingly popular term (as of Summer 1997) for progress, movement, or getting ahead. "We’ve got traction on the website app now."

Triage: Not dissimilar to the medical term. The process of deciding which bugs to fix and which to ignore in order to meet a ship date, or which elements in a project to retain and which to eliminate.

UI: Acronym for User Interface. Standard web terminology. The means by which people navigate through applications and documents on computers. Interfaces can take the form of textual, graphical, physical, and auditory devices. Often a synonym for buttons, buttons, and more buttons. "There’s nothing intuitive about the new UI. I can’t find anything!"

Uninstalled: Fired, canned, dismissed.

Upselling: Elegant term for the process of selling more or higher-grade products through their introduction on a more basic, lower-level product.

Usability: A well-established "process" by which it’s determined which features in a product are most "usable" for "users." "Have you run the MAC version through usability testing yet?"

Vaporware: A Microsoft classic, dating back to at least the early-‘90s era of Microserfs (likely before), and now escaped into the world at large. Software that was conceived (and probably promoted and advertised) but never came to fruition; by extension, a foolish or fanciful conceit.

Weasel Text: A message on a Microsoft website explaining why a heretofore-popular feature or option has been discontinued. As with most aspects of Microsoft that require communicating with the public or the media, these tend to range from stilted and murky to spectacularly inept.

Weasel User: What the outside world has learned to label "computer nerd." Specifically, a buyer of a Microsoft product who bombards PSS (the company’s customer support apparatus) with constant and generally ludicrous technical complaints.

Whiteboard: Only slightly higher-tech version of, as name suggests, that classic educational aid the blackboard. Meeting crutch, power tool, and sacred hard-data repository all at once, the whiteboard is a central ingredient of Microculture. No meeting worth its salt is without an impromptu rush to the whiteboard by one or more issue-driving parties (usually the person running the meeting) to sketch a schematic or devise a quick outline or highlight an idea. In order to leave a clear, tabula rasa-style whiteboard for the next group, these key insights are invariably erased after a meeting (usually before anyone can write them down).

© 1995-1988 by Ken Barnes and associates. All rights reserved.