Service Untitled

Ah, the generic PR-issued corporate statements. Some of them are rather interesting and most of them make almost no sense. If they do make sense, they usually aren’t related to what happened. Here are three examples from Microsoft about a patent issue with Novell:

“Microsoft and Novell have agreed to disagree on whether certain open source offerings infringe Microsoft patents and whether certain Microsoft offerings infringe Novell patents. The agreement between our two companies puts in place a workable solution for customers for these issues, without requiring an agreement between our two companies on infringement.

“Both of our companies are fully committed to moving forward with all of the important work under these agreements. The agreements will advance interoperability between Windows and Linux and put in place a new intellectual property bridge between proprietary and open source software. Customers and participants throughout our industry will clearly benefit from these results.

“We at Microsoft respect Novell’s point of view on the patent issue, even while we respectfully take a different view. Novell is absolutely right in stating that it did not admit or acknowledge any patent problems as part of entering into the patent collaboration agreement. At Microsoft we undertook our own analysis of our patent portfolio and concluded that it was necessary and important to create a patent covenant for customers of these products. We are gratified that such a solution is now in place.”

I like the one that says the two companies have agreed to disagree.

By the way, these are not obscure things I tried to find. My search term? Simply: ”Microsoft statement”. I know Microsoft is a big company so I tried them to see what statements they give. These are just so thought out and so corporate – and there is room for companies to improve.

Here is a statement I would give:

“Microsoft and Novell have not been able to come to an agreement as to whether certain open source offerings infringe upon Microsoft patents and whether certain Microsoft offerings infringe upon Novell patents. Our additional agreement’s purpose is to put a workable solution in place for both company’s customers.”

I am not even sure if that is factually correct compared to the original statements, but I think it is somewhat close. Some tips for statements:

• Try to use plain language (no complex words or terms, statements like “have agreed to disagree”, etc.).
• Make the statements longer if it is necessary to make it easier to understand. Being too brief may confuse people.
• Use enough pronouns to avoid sounding like a robot (i. e. Microsoft and Novell could say “we”), but don’t use too many.
• Never accuse a customer. They may be dead wrong in the situation, but never accuse them. If you have to say something like “We understand the customer’s concerns and frustrations, but we do believe the customer’s story may be exaggerated.”
• If you make a mistake, admit it.
• Tell what happened that caused the mistake.
• Tell what you did to fix the mistake.
• Tell the readers what you are doing to prevent the mistake from happening.
• Be honest.

Here is an example that I came up with for when a company missed something very obvious in a computer repair (based on something I read about):

“Company XYZ repairs thousands of computers per day. Due to our volume, we occasionally do miss a problem and sometimes do not find the best solution to the problem as quickly as we would like. In this situation, we dropped the ball and are not happy with ourselves for doing so. We have provided our sincere apologies to the concerned customer and are constantly working to further improve the quality level for the repairs we do at Company XYZ.”

The statement is honest, provides information that is actually useful, and does not use any weird lingo. Of course, the types of statement vary greatly from issue to issue and company to company.

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