The worst acronym ever

Acronyms are inherent to technology. They economize on written and verbal communications of otherwise complex subjects in such a way that we can communicate more clearly and with greater efficiency. However, this assumes that verbally pronouncing the acronym will take less time than just saying the words that the acronym represents. This is not always the case.

Among the best acronyms is IP. Two short syllables that are easy to say versus the six syllable ‘Internet Protocol.’ Less time typing, less time speaking, no loss of meaning. Exactly what an acronym is supposed to do.

But what about IaaS (infrastructure as a service)? First, this isn’t really even an acronym, it’s a made up letter construct. In an acronym, each letter represents a word but here the second ‘a’ is the word a, not shorthand for a word starting with ‘a’. And, in the interested of verbal efficiency, do we really need the first ‘a’ to stand in for the word as? And who is the high school student that decided to alter case? I know that the VoIP people started it (well, actually, it was Sarah Jessica Parker’s character SanDeE in L.A. Story) but it’s a little too cute for technology discussions. Just ask telcos deploying FTTP, not FttP.

The real problem is more subtle, and it applies to all of the pick-a-letter followed by ‘aaS’ acronyms (SaaS, PaaS, etc.). All of these acronyms are difficult to say. Juxtaposing two a’s next to one another forces the speaker to slow down so that the listener can distinguish them. It’s a close call, but saying “i… a… … a… s” may not save any time over the eight syllable expression it represents. With PaaS and SaaS we get around this problem by ignoring the letters and pronouncing them “pass” and “sass”. But doing this with IaaS could get embarrassing.

I don’t know who it was that coined the term IaaS and I know that all things “aaS” are considered cloud-like and therefore valuable but IaaS may be the worst acronym ever coined.