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Comment by watersb | Hacker News Reader

Duwamish Books

Also there was a pet-supplies store in there somewhere. Back when MSDN published as newsletter as a sort of newspaper-sized thing.

The Duwamish companies were used in extended examples of client-server business automation with Microsoft Office and their server products combination of SQL Server, IIS, Active Directory, Message Queues; packaged as "Microsoft BackOffice" (egads).

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Egads? It's a standard term, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_office

I had a similar reaction when in a business meeting and one of the company reps said he was "Opening the Kimono".

A term of art in the business world today; I moved to scientific research computing in 2000 and had not gotten the memo about open kimonos.

Egads.

This is surprising to me too, in that what I know about "kimonos" is that they are women's clothing underneath which no underwear is worn.

What's the term supposed to refer to?

It’s a metaphor for showing someone things that are typically kept hidden.

Sure, but in that case... why not "lifting up the skirt"?

That characterization would be too graphic for many corporate environments.

I had a former boss (a couple decades ago) that was also fond of the "open the kimono" saying. Ugh. WTF is wrong with saying "full openness" or "full disclosure" or something else that sounds appropriately business-like.

"Baring it all" would be a native idiom preserving even the emphatic nudity reference while not suggesting that you're taking off some other woman's clothes.

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