Wrong. Marketing is all about convincing, nothing more. Have you ever heard somebody say "I prefer product X because it has such good marketing"?

I think you're doing a disservice to marketing. Whilst I think a lot of it is just made-up hocus pocus as much as the next engineer =), how you present something is important. It's like being a genius inside your head, not not being able to express yourself.

Ultimately, if you combine a good technical foundation with solid communication, you have a winning combination.

Like it it not, that's how the world works. Nobody cares if you have great code and awesome tests, if you have poorly written documentation and you can't tell somebody what you do in a few sentences. Don't underestimate how difficult it is to get these last two right.

But in this case, communication is not to random people but to fellow engineers.

I've never heard anybody complain about the graphical communication of gnu.org, yet everybody seems to have been using the gnu C compiler for the last decades. Just an example.

Finally, have a good look at that picture: http://www.deepstream.io/#segment-diagram And be honest, what does that tell you as an engineer? And what would you take from it as a "random person"?

Is that what you call "solid communication"?