Sure, except that Mann isn't trying to write a replacement press release for NewsGator, not really. He's really just trying to turn up some ears toward just how utterly opaque the previous one was. "Bullshit", "douchey", "dumbass", and "hold me" are great words for the intended audience, viz. those of us curious about why the hell the first one was so dense.
In the end, don't you just want to rewrite the goddamn thing yourself? Take out the buzz and the sass, put in the keywords. You're practically working for NewsGator already, and you're definitely caught in the wave Mann stirred up and tossed up to his internet call box.
There are two things about this article that made me want to say something about it.
First, in his zeal to deflate the original, he killed the original business value of the piece, which is to get picked up when someone in the trade press needs to fill inches with material on CRMs or HRMs or enterprise social software.
Second, the big problem he sees this release demonstrating is a sort of Orwellian perversion of the English language by business functionaries. But that's not really the problem at all, is it? NewsGator has a problem no copyeditor can solve: they have nothing to announce, but they have a full-time PR staff that needs to fill a press release quota, so you have a pre-announcement of a partnership program, partnership programs being the thing that every enterprise software company announces when they have nothing to announce.
If he wanted to talk to "people like us", Merlin could have written a "translation from PR-speak into English" post just like Gruber always does. Instead, Merlin used this other device of "what a press release written for humans should look like", and it missed the mark.
I'll admit that he took this pretty far out of context. He only tossed the very leanest of bones to the business sense of the article and totally dropped the visceral reality of PR you invoke. Worse, once he deflated this ecosystem where this kind of writing can and does exist, he used that censored point of view to fuel a snarky diatribe against the practice as a whole.
So, yeah, judgements made out of context hold less water.
But Merlin's audience isn't sweatshop PR workers. It's techy blogreaders with too much time on their hands and a sense of humor. He's not offering this as criticism to NewsGator, but more wants to just burn it at the stake and point. If it were something more then I'd hope for more consideration of the actual audience and environment.
As it stands it's a calling. By writing something that hyperbolically demonstrates his point, perhaps he just hopes to incrementally move the actual practice that direction.
In the end, don't you just want to rewrite the goddamn thing yourself? Take out the buzz and the sass, put in the keywords. You're practically working for NewsGator already, and you're definitely caught in the wave Mann stirred up and tossed up to his internet call box.