IT buzzwords gone bust

MANILA, Philippines - Hi-tech tongues don’t talk old. In a profession where constant innovations also usher in new terminologies and words that put pressure on dictionary publishers, peppering one’s speech with buzzwords is almost a job requirement. But even the hottest buzzwords turn cold so make sure you don’t stick to using what’s old as it’s a sure sign that you’re getting old.

Here’s a list of 10 outdated IT buzzwords that you should not be trumpeting around anymore unless you want to assert your superiority based on seniority.

B2B, B2C. We’ve grown to hate them, actually, this business of business-to-business and business-to-consumer. Yet we still hear them being mentioned occasionally along with its cousin, e-business.

NEW ECONOMY. What economy? What new? This phrase used to refer to the booming era that was the dot.com. That period is long gone and so is the economy as we know it. So, please for the love of God, don’t say it anymore as it only adds insult to injury.

SUNRISE INDUSTRY. This irritating cutesy term was often used by government trade officials convinced that medical transcription and software development could catapult the nation to a new dawn of progressiveness. It’s a sunrise that never was, so give it a rest.

INFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAY. The information superhighway refers to the global networks of information and communication that includes the Internet, telephone, cable and satellite. This term has a shortcut, the infobahn. Both the long and short of it need parental guidance when uttered around children, so discretion is advised.

INTERNETWORKING. This concept of connecting two or more computer networks via gateways using a common routing technology is not new anymore so commit the term internetworking to the past. It continues to be a very popular concept though only not by the term but simply as the Internet.

INTRANET. Companies called their private networks and access-restricted websites running on Internet Protocol as intranet. It’s been updated to a more hip term: Virtual Private Network or VPN for short.

ASP, SaaS. Say what? These two queer acronyms are a sure way to get kids firing up Google or Wikipedia so they would make sense of what you are saying. Not so long ago, both are buzzwords for the way vendors host software applications and deliver them over the Web on subscription basis so the users don’t have to own and maintain the programs themselves. Today, the concept still holds but under a new name: cloud computing.

PERSONAL DIGITAL ASSISTANT. A very popular device in the 1990s was the PDA. The standard-bearer was the Palm Pilot, which became a ubiquitous status symbol of geekiness. After going through several tech evolutions, yesterday’s PDA has come to be today’s smartphone, a category lorded over by BlackBerry and iPhone.

VOICE OVER IP. We’re getting a little ahead of ourselves here by suggesting that the term VoIP be slowly removed from current tech lingo, but there’s a reason for it. High-tech soothsayers believe the time is near for all telephone calls to be carried on the Internet. Besides, the acronym when uttered is almost as long as the complete term so why complicate it when, really, most people understand the concept completely using the free, commercial service called Skype.

PUSH TECHNOLOGY. By all means push this one off your vocabulary of tech terms and replace it with RSS (Real Simple Syndication). Push is a way for online content providers to “push” them to subscribers who have initially expressed the type of information they prefer to receive on a regular basis. Whenever new content is available on one of those channels, the server would push that information out to the user. RSS is made up of different types of Web feeds that can be in the form of blog entries, news headlines, video files and others that publishers syndicate in a standardized format.

If you noticed, many of the buzzwords from yesterday and today, and definitely in the future, all come from one mother ship that is the Internet. As the ultimate source of all kinds of information, the Internet is one term that we believe will never get old. Of course, when it comes to technology nothing is guaranteed perpetuity and for the 10 terminologies listed above, 2010 will erase them further from our memories.