Andrew Grill, talking about Skype’s plans for in-call advertising:

“highlight unique and local brand experiences”- what?? Humans don’t speak like this to to other humans.  This is ad speak.

There is a clear phenomenon where people get so embedded in marketing and sales that they lose touch with normal humanity, and come to serve the abstract gods of marketing objectives. I am reminded of a marketing-written proposal for a mobile app I saw once, that required the user to go through two pages of data capture before they could start using it. Serves marketing goals, no sense of what humans actually do, doomed to failure.

Or, of course, this could just be Microsoft brining its “magic touch” to Skype. I fear for Yammer.