There are a very few themes & tropes that survive the test of time and Shakespeare got to most of them first. I think I first started with the Unicorn theme in my writing at the peak of the marketing hype for Cisco UCS in mid-2009 when the “social media evangelists” of the day (all since moved on) breathlessly told me that UCS did all of this “stuff” with a fancy network adapter, a few overdue and obvious BIOS enhancements and so much more.
Since then:
- I've been "saddling up my unicorn" on the podcast to talk about vendor values,
- the term Unicorn Bacon to describe the highly unlikely or hard to use
- we used Unicorn Tears to describe ordinary features built onto an existing product that are massively over-hyped.
- Unicorn sightings as a metaphor for vendor promises and late delivery
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My comment at TechFieldDay 1 in 2009 was "bathing an x86 motherboard with Unicorn Tears doesn't make it exceptional".
The concept of unicorns in IT Marketing has been around for a long time and it's time to die.
Equally, bacon has been a recurring meme. I guess I’ve participated in the bacon meme at some point but it doesn’t seem funny anymore.
New leaf then. I’m ditching Unicorns and Bacon. Time to find new memes.
Suggestions ?
