Bad Words for Describing Software Products (2019)

>The fix for bad words isn’t to swap them with “good” words, but to answer “what?” and “so what?” in your product description.

This seems to be the central thesis, but the first problem is that we don't always write marketing copy to be pointed, we most often write it to be engaging.

The second problem is knowing your audience. If your product is creating an actually-simpler way to do something complex without trading off the power to do those things, guess what? You should say that it's simple while still powerful.

There are certainly marketing taglines that just string together these words in less meaningful ways. Here's an example:

> A simple and powerful way to build a checkout experience.

This is meaningless guff and fits the article's definition. But then:

>A simple but powerful way to build complex checkout experiences.

Now the intent is to tell the reader that the simplicity doesn't compromise the depth of customisation. It's also fair to assume the reader has enough domain information to understand what such a compromise might mean.

Therefore these words aren't "bad", it's using them to gloss over poor copy writing that is "bad".

Note that these aren't bad words to describe software, say a library. It's about products, in particular enterprise products.

A free library that is fast or flexible or powerful mean different things to me: speed, breadth, depth. For another example, yaml is over-powered in a bad way, TOML is simple in a good one.

The reason why these words become meaningless in context is because of the peddlers, like a sportscaster saying 'literally'.