I am an avid fan of Amazon. It's a company, a service and a brand that has consistently over-delivered for me, and as a result, I'm inclined to use Amazon for all my online purchases. I'm also inclined to recommend it to others.

First disclosure out of the way.

You should also know that I'm a giant nerd who still plays with digits in my free time. I own and manage a few websites; I've custom coded a web app or two; and I'm constantly moving data through a network of cloud-based services, which gives me great peace of mind.

Second disclosure out of the way.

I recently received an email from Amazon's cloud services platform asking me to participate in a survey. Amazon wanted to know why I had not used CloudFront, a service that is part of its cloud computing suite. I use Amazon's simple storage service to keep my photographs safe and sound, and I signed up for CloudFront because I thought it might be a good service for hosting some of my sites. But when I went to the page, this is the description that greeted me:

Amazon CloudFront delivers your static and streaming content using a global network of edge locations. Requests for your objects are automatically routed to the nearest edge location, so content is delivered with the best possible performance.

Now I consider myself a fairly sophisticated guy, but I have no idea what the above paragraph means.

Granted, I'm no engineer, but why do service descriptions have to be so technical? If a true digit-head needed to know that CloudFront uses edge locations, couldn't that information have come later? Words like 'streaming content' and 'global network' have become so over-used that they actually make a description more ambiguous. I just need to know what CloudFront does.

It turns out that CloudFront is a brilliant service that makes it easy for a web developer to use several other Amazon cloud services (such as storage) to serve web pages and other digital content. Imagine you're developing an iPhone app. You could use CloudFront to store and retrieve information stored in an Amazon database, bundle it into an XML stream and send it to a user's iPhone—simple right?

As I said before, I don't mean to pick on Amazon, because I'm a fan. But it's time for tech companies to use plain language, and while also avoiding bland, generic statements. Look at how 37Signals describes Ruby on Rails:

Ruby on Rails is an open-source web framework that's optimized for programmer happiness and sustainable productivity. It lets you write beautiful code by favoring convention over configuration.

Ok, so maybe the "programmer happiness" comment is over the top, but at least I know what the product does. Maybe CloudFront should describe itself as:

Amazon CloudFront is a content delivery service that helps developers create powerful digital applications that take full advantage of other services on the Amazon platform. It's fast, global, and very cost-effective.

My copy won't win any awards. But at least you have a better sense of what CloudFront is.