[qez]

Whoever wrote this piece is a bad communicator who thinks he's a good communicator, and then goes through life getting confused about why no one understands him.

For example, in the story about the Japanese, he assumes some context from the reader: "What are they building? What is Fujitsu and what is Habitat and why does Japan need their own special version of it?" It's not even clear they're building anything technical, so I wondered, "Why do they need a client and server? And also, didn't you ever think to check their internal technical details before? What did you think would be the result?"

> “who’s going to pay to make all those links?” or “why would anyone want to put documents online?”

These are good questions and you better have a well-worded answer! In fact, it is easy to answer these if you have prepared for them. Did you just assume that the potential customer would already have familiar with the technicals of your product? If that was the case, they would have bought it from someone else already. Your target demo is the uninformed.

[user_7832]

> Whoever wrote this piece is a bad communicator who thinks he's a good communicator, and then goes through life getting confused about why no one understands him.

As much as I appreciate the author writing this piece, I have to agree with your comment. I was half wondering if the entire article was an exercise in “this is how you don’t communicate, here’s the final para which explains everything I wrote!”. Reading the comments on the article and here on HN helped.

[unwind]

Habitat [1] was a massively multi-player online role-playing game, or perhaps one of the first ones, by LucasArts.

It was first released in 1986, and awarded at Game Developers Choice Awards in 2001. So, pretty old-school stuff. The site is about that game, and stories around it, so perhaps one can assume that readers know at least that much context.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitat_(video_game)

[relaxing]

> For example, in the story about the Japanese, he assumes some context from the reader: "What are they building? What is Fujitsu and what is Habitat and why does Japan need their own special version of it?" It's not even clear they're building anything technical, so I wondered, "Why do they need a client and server? And also, didn't you ever think to check their internal technical details before? What did you think would be the result?"

None of those details are important to the story. Leaving out extraneous detail is good communication.

[eloisant]

Yeah it was a very confusing read, and when I finally understood the point of the writer I wondered if he wrote a confusing article on purpose to create a "Aha!" moment when you finally understand what he's saying, to illustrate his point through this article.