Сполский в своей заметке, высмеивающей Микрософт, вспоминает, как двадцать лет назад смеялся на эту же тему над Ай-би-эмом:

When I worked at Microsoft almost two decades ago we made fun of IBM for having a different word for everything. Everybody said, «Hard Drive», IBM said «Fixed Disk». Everybody said, «PC», IBM said «Workstation». IBM must have had whole departments of people just to FACT CHECK the pages in their manuals which said, «This page intentionally left blank».

Now when you talk to anyone who has been at Microsoft for more than a week you can’t understand a word they’re saying. Which is OK, you can never understand geeks. But at Microsoft you can’t even understand the marketing people, and, what’s worse, they don’t seem to know that they’re speaking in their own special language, understood only to them.