Buzzword Bingo

I wrote a program to play a version of Bingo with SGI buzzwords. It was later ported by Chris Pirazzi to web format, and he used some of my buzzwords to produce an artificial press release generator. It caught on like wildfire, and eventually made it to the front page of the Wall Street Journal.

Here are some links:

Wall Street Journal Article
Webified Buzzword Bingo
Chris Pirazzi's "Corp Speak"

Later, Jon Carroll of the San Francisco Chronicle wrote an article about Buzzword Bingo in one of his columns, asking for information about it. I replied, and became famous again. Here is the original article:

A fun new way to play bingo

And here is the followup article:

Even more on, uh, Buzzword Bingo

Software Usability

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In 1993 I wrote an internal memo for Silicon Graphics on the usability of our software. The memo was highly critical of certain things. Unfortunately, it was leaked by someone and had widespread distribution on the web.

Of course marketing was furious -- the competition was showing it to customers to make them see how shoddy SGI software was.

But what was amazing is the "fan mail" I got in response. There were dozens of letters, virtually all of which said the same thing; namely, that the situation was exactly the same, or worse, where they worked. Somebody said I should make it a template so you could just replace "SGI" with your company name, and "IRIX" with your company's software product.

The document was even used in a software engineering course at Princeton.

Anyway, here it is in the original ASCII format.