The computer and technology industry should simplify its language and focus on marketing products that consumers really need and can understand, according to an executive at chip-maker Advanced Micro Devices (AMD).
In the midst of a campaign to change the discussion about microchips from one focused on clock speed, or computing cycles per second, to one on performance based on specific applications, AMD has formed an industry group to study what the company calls the technology gap.
Vice-president for consumer advocacy Patrick Moorehead, who is in charge of both projects, is touring Asia to spread the message.
The slowdown in the industry could be blamed on the fact that vendors had been pushing new technologies faster than consumers were able to grasp them, Mr Moorehead said. Renewed growth would depend on changing the vocabulary.
'The technology gap is fundamentally the spread between all the innovation out there in the market place and people's ability to internalise all this technology.
'Part of that is the language that we use, whether it's 802.11a, 802.11b, 1394 Firewire, DDR, all of these are just alphabet soup that the customer doesn't really understand,' Mr Moorehead said.