Software Product Marketing 2.0?

One pet peeve I have with the enterprise software industry is the marketing. I find most software product marketing to fluctuate between the puerile to the abstruse.

The abstruse bit actually gets me more than the puerile does. For example, most product brochures do an amazing job filling 2-4 pages with words and the obligatory marketecture diagram, but still saying next to nothing about what the product actually does or how it will specifically benefit the buyer. My belief is this is a contributor to sales inefficiencies because now it takes 2 flights from a sales rep and a demo from a sales engineer until the customer has the first clue what the product does or what to compare it to.

Can we throw out the product marketing slick? What would replace it? I was pondering the idea of a product marketing slick wiki. The idea would be that for each product you start with a normal 2 page product description but then readers could comment on it or ask questions and the product managers, marketers or users can clarify and enhance until all the marketing-speak is scrubbed out and you're left with a lucid description. I’d be curious to get any comments if this sort of thing has been tried before.