Word Spy - marketecture

marketecture (mar.kuh.TEK.chur) n. 1. A new computer architecture that is being marketed aggressively despite the fact that it doesn't yet exist as a finished product. 2. The design and structure of a market or a marketing campaign. Also: marchitecture.

Example Citation:

"The Advanced Micro Devices and Intel debate, always a heated one (er, sorry), has come to the fore after the launch of AMD's Athlon XP last week. With it comes the marketecture hype that outright processor speed isn't everything, and good luck to them if it proves to be the case."
—Robert X. Cringely, "Notes From the Field," InfoWorld, October 15, 2001

"Business intelligence ... didn't really catch on until IBM announced their Business Intelligence Program Initiative. Everybody wanted to be part of that market structure — or marketecture — and it included everything under the sun except the Internet."
—Jean Schauer, "Sterling Software," DM Review, January 2000

Earliest Citation:

"ENF may be real, but the notion of a link between ENF and IMS products is overblown in Braude's eyes. 'It's what I call 'marketecture,' ' the Gartner analyst says."
—Ralph Carlyle, "Assessing Computer Associates' new architecture," DATAMATION, August 1, 1990

"What separates General American from its competition, he says, is its creative uses of technology, such as its 'marketecture' program, which allows General American Life to gather data, transmit it and disperse it in the office. Liddy says the system provides access to product information, sales information, illustrations, disclosure requirements and role-playing "
—Dan Lonkevich, "The challenge beyond consolidation," Best's Review, September 1995

Notes:

The first sense of marketecture is very similar to the word slideware that I posted back in May. That is, it refers to something that exists as a finished product only in the minds and PowerPoint presentations of marketing types. But while slideware applies only to software, marketecture refers to broader notion of architecture, the overall design and structure of a computer system or technology.

Related Word:

slideware

Subject Categories:

Business - Marketing
Computers - Hardware
Computers - Programming and Software

Posted on November 21, 2001 at 11:10 AM
Updated on November 21, 2001 at 11:10 AM