“Scalable,” a politician of a word
“Scalable” is a politician of a word. It has attractiveness to obtain solid backing from diverse factions- it has something to offer both the engineericans and the marketerists. At the same time it has the dexterity to mean different things to different people, so that the sales team can always argue that the competition’s product lacks “scalability”. The word even supports multiple mental images- you can think of soldiers scaling a wall or climbers scaling a mountain; a more correct image is that of scaling a picture to making it bigger. Even technology cynics can get behind the word “scalable”: if a technology is scalable, they would argue, that means it hasn’t been scaled.
From Is Semantic Web Technology Scalable? by Eric Hellman.
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