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Comment by xwowsersx | Hacker News Reader

This is how most emails at the exec/c-suite level read. Admittedly kind of annoying, but a lingo develops and shorthand is used all over. There have been many in-person conversations with the people included in this email so they have all this built up context and shared language. To you, it sounds cryptic, but the recipients understood exactly what Satya meant here.

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> This is how most emails at the exec/c-suite level read

I've been reading @TechEmails for years and I've never seen any email as incomprehensible as this one.

I don’t think it’s the lingo/shorthand but rather the fact that some of the sentences don’t parse at all.

It’s possibly to figure out what he meant, but it requires significantly more time than if the sentences were constructed “correctly”.

Missing pronouns are easy to fill in, but consider this sentence:

> But [I] want to use every opportunity to make Cloud Streaming more mainstream the better it is in the long run […]

As soon as I reach “the better it is” I feel a mental jolt because I expect a construction along the lines of “the more <X> the better it is” (apparently this is called a “correlative comparison”); even though I just read the word “more”, it didn’t fit into the expected construction, so I go back over the sentence to see if I misread it.

“…want to basically use every opportunity to make Cloud Streaming more mainstream. The better it [will be] for us in the long run [and] for all the strategic reasons we talk about”

That bothers me a bunch but not less than using "ask" as a replacement for "request" and "learning" for "lesson".

I am so with you. "Ask" drives me up a wall!

I find that limiting the number of things that drive you up a wall is good.

"I have something to ask of you" is not a novel term for request. And ask is softer than request, giving the other party more opening to decline. I don't hate it.

I think the annoyance is in the use of the word “ask” as a noun. Example: “I have an ask for you” being used instead of “I have a request for you”.

Yeah we're talking here about "ask" as a noun, as in "what's the ask?"

> I find that limiting the number of things that drive you up a wall is good.

Me too, but if this is really just a way of saying "this shouldn't upset you", you should just say that. As stated, it comes across as condescending.

"Ask" the pseudo-noun.

I think the case re: lesson / learning is less clear, because in a “learning” there’s no teacher, you’ve all learned something, whereas lesson implies teacher and taught.

I still hate “learning” as a noun though.

A lot of the time, a metaphorical lesson has no teacher, too. "Learning" is imported to the tech scene from India, where "a verb-ing" seems to be able to be the noun form of one instance of the verb (in certain contexts).

It I fall on my butt due to running on ice, nobody really taught me, yet I still learned a lesson :-)

I’m not putting myself anywhere on his level - want to make that clear - but I was specifically referring to clarity.

I work with execs at our company a lot and am often in their email chains - agree on the lingo and shorthand for stuff, but it’s usually clear. You’d be surprised at how candid people are and how much cussing there can be lol. But I was specifically referring to the clarity of the message.

Either way it’s just an opinion and as I said, I think I was just idealizing too much and expected something else.

Yeah, I got you. I understood you were just expressing shock at how unclear this was and I totally hear you. I was just commenting that this is surprisingly more common than you might think. It could also very well be that Satya is a worse emailer than most. Or it could be that he fired this off while jetsetting or running late to a meeting. Who knows.

So, is this common, or is this worse than most?

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