Are You...Enthusiastic?!?

As a word takes hold, beware the marketing departments that notice that word, and begin to use it. These days, when I talk to various companies, and they use the word "enthusiast," I can hear the "ka-ching!" of cash registers emanating from between their ears. The thinking goes that an enthusiast is a drooling slave to their passions, and will spend any amount of money to achieve some goal. In the case of companies like Nvidia, ATI, AMD, and Intel, that usually means spending gobs of cash on top-of-the-line gear that's only marginally faster than one step down from the top. (I suppose that means that PlayStation 3 buyers will be "Sony enthuisasts???"

Plus, as marketing people often do, they dilute the word. They'll use it interchangeably when discussing performance, gaming, home theater and any number of other arenas of interest. There are often implicit assumptions that all enthusiasts are alike. For example, let's take an encounter I recently had with a recent marketing guy from Nvidia. I'm leaving his name out, because he's a pretty good guy, and he does seem to care about what he's doing—a sort of "marketing enthusiast," if you will.