Business writing (the kind that tells you about best-of-breed, market-leading solutions) is awful because it is written by people who do not understand their product, their market, or worse, both.
You'll notice that business writing of this type says very little in many words. That's because the author doesn't know what to write, so they resort to vague phrases that say everything and nothing. Technical documentation sometimes suffers from this too (e.g. "Fznoozlator: Fznoozlates the document").
Someone who truly understands the business benefits of their offering and their customers will write text that reflects that. That's why the Woot and Saddleback Leather examples are so good. It's a lot harder to write this sort of widely compelling content for enterprise software, but a skilled marketer can still communicate the value proposition well. Problem is, most skilled marketers would rather slit their own wrists than work on that kind of boring product.
Comments
Business writing (the kind that tells you about best-of-breed, market-leading solutions) is awful because it is written by people who do not understand their product, their market, or worse, both.
You'll notice that business writing of this type says very little in many words. That's because the author doesn't know what to write, so they resort to vague phrases that say everything and nothing. Technical documentation sometimes suffers from this too (e.g. "Fznoozlator: Fznoozlates the document").
Someone who truly understands the business benefits of their offering and their customers will write text that reflects that. That's why the Woot and Saddleback Leather examples are so good. It's a lot harder to write this sort of widely compelling content for enterprise software, but a skilled marketer can still communicate the value proposition well. Problem is, most skilled marketers would rather slit their own wrists than work on that kind of boring product.