> If I had more time, I would have written a short letter - Blaise Pascal
>>
It's not a big truck.
It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand, those tubes can be
filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in
line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube
enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material. - Sen Ted R. Stevens
Summarizing is tough. As Sebastian pointed out, you almost need a summary per
target audience. Those two quotes highlight the problem: to the domain expert,
it's almost impossible to summarize an issue because you'll be jumped on by
other domain experts - and, knowing all about the issue, it feels dangerous to
omit the details. Conversely, if an expert briefs some Senate aides - who in
turn brief a non-technical senator - you can end up with a widely mocked speech.
If you tone down the mockery, it's not hard to see how Sen. Stevens came
to his wording - pipes, capacity, delays, queues; it does start to sound like a
series of tubes.
One of my coworkers likens it to the water system:
The city has plenty of water, with big pipes and good pressure going to
everyone's house. Your house's feed to the water main limits how much
water you can get at one time - that's your download speed. Plumbing
design, pipe and valve quality all affect the delay between turning your
faucet on and nice cold water coming out. That's your latency. You need
to optimize both.
I tend to find that customers like car analogies:
On a perfect racetrack, a Ferrari will reach the end before a Honda Civic.
The Ferrari has more power, and is designed for faster speeds. On a
public road network, the Ferrari still outpaces the Civic on fast, open roads -
but it only takes one traffic jam, one poorly designed intersection or
stoplight - for both vehicles to be seriously delayed. Ferrari's have a
very high speed (your download speed), and multi-lane highways have
great capacity (high speed networks) - but a single congested traffic
ramp (a buffer between connections) can ruin the overall travel experience
by adding long delays (latency) while cars merge onto different roads.
Quality of Experience optimizes the buffers between roads, providing
a smoother experience overall.
(Both could be shortened, but analogy is frequently the way to reach
non-technical users)