Today comes word from Peter Kafka on Silicon Alley Insider, via correspondent Alberto Escarlate, that Cisco will soon launch a social media solution called EOS. That stands for Entertainment Operating System at Cisco, or if you're a Cisco investor perhaps, it could stand for Everybody Ought to Spend… Swoon… Sign up?

So what is it? That's vague. Here's what Mr. Escarlate reports based on what a Cisco senior vp and general manager had to say about it:

EOS… is "an open software platform for creating and managing a community-based entertainment experience." It's a back-end infrastructure that will power entertainment and media based on discovery, community, multimedia.

An operating system, a creative platform, infrastructure? Two or three mints in one? A lemon drop?

Apparently in support of the goodness and appropriateness of this product development and Cisco's credibility in the endeavor, this same senior VP referenced Five Across, a San Jose-based builder of corporate social networks that Cisco acquired earlier this year. Here's a VentureBeat report on that by Matt Marshall from the time and which notes Five Across employed 11 people.

You know, assuming the reporting is accurate, if a company isn't ready to talk about a new product, shouldn't it remain quiet until it is ready unless a little good preconditioning, using words and phrases people understand, can chill would-be competitors and/or get a head start on sales to early adopters? If, alternatively, someone doesn't know the product well enough to talk about it — and I'm not saying that's the case here… maybe it is, maybe it isn't… shouldn't they find someone who does know enough to say the right things clearly at the right time?

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