Buzz words - is there any greater evil? Throughout the brief but turbulent period in which the IT industry has been subjected to mainstream marketing and its bold visions of compulsive spending, we've seen the rise and fall of a number of catchwords.

Loosely speaking, one can chart the development of the tech industry with the buzz words used to market it - from relative obscurity in the early 90s, through the hype of the dot-com boom, to the bursting of the bubble and subsequent scramble by many a not-so-well-off company to reclaim its pre-1999 share price.

First there was ".com", which remains popular - to a certain extent - even today. Anything .com sounded grandiose, no matter how outrageous the business plan. Offline businesses, such as florists and boutique stores, started changing their names to .com and waiting for the big bucks to start rolling in! The sad thing is, investors scrambled for shares in the vein hope that once the Next Big Thing had floated on the stock exchange the company directors would actually care about their shareholders.

The oft-quoted Compuglobalhypermeganet comes to mind.

With the subsequent collapse of the industry, new buzz words needed to be found to coax potential investors back into what had become a shaky and disillusioned marketplace. Companies tried to differentiate themselves with such gems as "Client-focused", "End-to-end", "e-Solution", "Application Service Provider", "Information Architect" - and then there was that whole B2B cuffuffle!

Today, the market seems captivated by ".NET" and "XP". Both pioneered by Microsoft, every other company seems to be tacking an XP suffix onto their product line in some mad attempt to "stand out". I mean, why have 'Keyboard' when you can have 'Keyboard XP'! How long will it be before we see the washed up online florist flowers.com change their name to Flowers XP, (then change back to .com when it becomes popular again, in that 'see, I knew her before she was cool' kind of way).

Some say the next buzz word will be "nano". 'We've had our share of suffixes,' must have whirred the collective minds of countless swarms of marketing drones, 'so it's time for a prefix.' Revolutionary! I look forward to the day when nano, too, is applied to products completely unrelated to molecular nanosystems - I wouldn't put things like nano-refridgerator and nano-lipstick ("It'll nano-revolutionalise the way you XPerience life.com.au").

Of course, I'm going to pre-empt all the buzz word madness and register the domain that everyone will be squabbling over come next marketing season. Then, like the clever folks who nabbed Business.com (then sold it for USD $7.5 million before the dot-com crash), I can retire revered by advertisers everywhere!

Nanotechxp.com here I come!