Why real differentiation begins by looking beyond the familiar words
There is a curious thing about walking through Amsterdam.
To someone visiting for the first time, one canal can start to resemble another. The bridges, narrow houses and long rows of windows create a visual rhythm that seems to repeat itself across the city.
But spend more time looking and that impression quickly disappears.
The width of a house changes. A façade leans differently. A detail above a doorway reveals something about its history. Streets that initially seemed almost interchangeable gradually acquire their own identities. The differences were always there. Recognising them simply required a little more knowledge and attention.
As we prepare for the IBCShow, we have been thinking about how closely this resembles the challenge of communicating technology. Across the industry, we increasingly share the same vocabulary: Cloud, Software-defined,Interoperable, Scalable, Flexible, Observable, Orchestrated. All are important concepts. But when the same language is used to describe very different products and approaches, something important can become lost: differentiation.
Two companies may both describe their solutions as flexible, for example, while the engineering decisions that create that flexibility are completely different. Two products may both support IP workflows while approaching architecture, processing, deployment or operational control in fundamentally different ways. The terminology tells us what category we are looking at. It does not necessarily tell us what makes one approach different from another.
For us at Xpresso Communications, that is where technical communication needs to go deeper. Before we can tell a technology story, we need to understand the technology itself. That means working with engineers, product specialists and our technical writers to ask questions that go beyond the feature list.
How does it work? Why was it designed that way? What engineering decisions sit behind the claim? What does one approach enable that another does not? And what does that difference mean for the person who will actually deploy or operate it?
Only after understanding those layers can we begin translating technical differentiation into communication that is accurate, accessible and meaningful. Because repeating the same industry vocabulary more loudly does not make a company more distinctive. Sometimes we need to stop, look again and notice what others have walked past.
At IBC this year, thousands of technologies will compete for attention across the halls of the RAI. Many will use similar words. Our job is to help people spot the differences that really matter.
