Maybe a demo should be just that; not a magic show. Normalizing deception for profit doesn’t seem like a healthy thing for anyone, but that’s only because I** didn’t own any stock in apple back then. Edit: Yes, I am still salty about the purchasing Starfield also
Eh I think it’s fine because they weren’t selling the public engineering samples, they were selling finished devices. As long as the product they sold worked as shown on stage, that’s fine.
Yeah I think the industry learned from Bill Gates' flub when demoing Win98.
For those too young, it bluescreened and crashed on a giant projector screen in front of thousands of people when they plugged in a scanner to demonstrate "plug and play".
Right. You definitely want to avoid that because Bill Gates is a billionaire and Windows still dominates the market. Looks like Microsoft paid a heavy price for that transparency.
Maybe it’s just me, but maybe we shouldn’t be normalizing outright deceiving people when you’re selling a product.
How is that not false advertising? Why should companies be allowed to magic up a fake example of their product actually working, and sell that to customers, when the real product doesn’t actually work yet?
Just because it’s “perfectly normal” doesn’t make it okay to peddle propaganda and lie to people for profit.
It’s like the Tesla “robot” that was clearly a person in a weird suit. Why are they allowed to advertise things that functionally don’t exist? Why are they allowed to sell unfinished products with promise they may one day be finished (cough full self driving cough)?
I mean holy fuck it’s like Beeper offering paid access to a service that allows Android and PC users to use iMessage, but Apple keeps breaking each new iteration every few days… Like there was no long-term plan to make sure that the service would work long-term before asking people to pay for it.
It’s all fucking bonkers, man. We’ve just allowed snake-oil salesmen to rule the roost. The bigger the lie, the bigger the profit.
It’d be nice if you could show off a product that’s about to launch, and have it Just Work under what should be controlled conditions. But it never does. It never fucking does. The little electronic bastards get infested with gremlins the moment you expose them to an audience.
Having things break onstage isn’t necessarily any more representative than showing off what’ it’s supposed to do. It can leave people thinking the product is hopelessly buggy, when really it’s a rare or mild problem.
None of this is comparable to Tesla’s outright fraud.
Eh I think it’s fine because they weren’t selling the public engineering samples, they were selling finished devices. As long as the product they sold worked as shown on stage, that’s fine.
How is that not false advertising? Why should companies be allowed to magic up a fake example of their product actually working, and sell that to customers, when the real product doesn’t actually work yet?
For Apple, we can stop right here, the product worked as described. Apple did the demo, and then released the things they said they would in the time they said they would.
It’s like the Tesla “robot” that was clearly a person in a weird suit. Why are they allowed to advertise things that functionally don’t exist? Why are they allowed to sell unfinished products with promise they may one day be finished (cough full self driving cough)?
Snake oil salesman in the dictionary should just be updated to a picture of Elon Musk. Elon has a long track record of saying shit and not doing it, whether that’s full self driving, cybertruck (well, that finally came out), solving world hunger, etc.
I mean holy fuck it’s like Beeper offering paid access to a service that allows Android and PC users to use iMessage, but Apple keeps breaking each new iteration every few days… Like there was no long-term plan to make sure that the service would work long-term before asking people to pay for it.
Why should companies be allowed to magic up a fake example of their product actually working, and sell that to customers, when the real product doesn’t actually work yet?
The way Apple does things is insane, but they weren’t selling iPhones yet.
It’s not false advertising because it did everything it was advertised to do in the introductory demo when it went on sale six months later. Google is the one faking their demos.
There’s a very simple reason… The world is absurd, and we’ve designed an idiotic financial system full of issues
Here’s the thing… If Apple didn’t fool investors into giving them money, they might not have had the money to get through the difficult problem of getting to a production chain. And if Apple was honest and Google staged their demo, investors are going to be drawn to the party faking it
Obviously, there’s many problems with this, and the fact that they can just cash out and never deliver cough Tesla cough. There’s also the issue that this makes marketing and hype far more monetarily valuable than actual performance… It doesn’t matter to investors if Tesla or Apple lies, they made real money if they time it correctly
The government is supposed to put boundaries on this kind of behavior, because if anyone does this, it lets scammers take resources that should go to companies playing honestly and actually making things
But know what else produces extreme return on investment? Spending money to shape regulations
So each time Apple breaks it, they have to stop charging customers? Sounds like a real winning business plan to lose money each time you need to code up a new solution to the original problem. /s
That shows they actually care about billing their users fairly. They lost some money but gained some trust, just like how Apple would’ve lost some money if they didn’t fake their demo
How is that not false advertising? Why should companies be allowed to magic up a fake example of their product actually working, and sell that to customers, when the real product doesn’t actually work yet?
If when they ship the actual thing to the customer it’s not like they claimed then it’s fraud (or “false advertising” which is the lenient version).
Strictly for presentation ahead of time I think it’s borderline. Negative hype can kill a product that could have been good. Sure, complete honesty would be ideal, but if you say “well it sucks right now but we promise it will be ok when you buy it”, not many people would rush to order one. Many good products never made it to market because of insufficiently good perception. On the flip side, creating positive hype out of smoke and mirrors can be used to kill a competitor’s product for no good reason, so it’s not quite ok either.
Strictly for presentation ahead of time I think it’s borderline.
I disagree, I think this is equally as bad. These presentations are still false advertising, just to a different audience.
These presentations are selling investors and press and attention on something that doesn’t exist yet. Sure, sometimes it works out where the product works, but other times, it’s wasted money from investors and attention from the public that wasn’t warranted.
I don’t see this any differently than the current shit show with The Day Before. Both are promising smoke and mirrors. Apple succeeded and is praised and people are here defending it saying it’s okay. The Day Before didn’t, and everyone’s at their throats saying it shouldn’t be allowed and that they should be sued for false advertising and for the amount of time wasted on hype for something that never came.
Negative hype can kill a product that could have been good.
Positive false hype can deceive people into wasting money.
Sure, complete honesty would be ideal, but if you say “well it sucks right now but we promise it will be ok when you buy it”, not many people would rush to order one.
And they shouldn’t. It’s just another way of saying “people acting rationally based on truthful information”
Many good products never made it to market because of insufficiently good perception.
That should be a separate issue. It’s not the only available path, just one often taken because it’s the most forgiving of shoddy business practices, doesn’t justify its existence, either.
On the flip side, creating positive hype out of smoke and mirrors can be used to kill a competitor’s product for no good reason, so it’s not quite ok either.
I think people are starting to realize the depth of corporate deception and bad-faith practices and how that affects everyone at large, and so they’re rightly tired of them and trying to reset it all back to simple, effective, and fair ethical standards.
I had to look up the robot one. I think they tried to get away with it actually being the robot, but since everyone saw through it, they went another route. lmao. It was supposed to be here end of last year too, where is it?
It would absolutely have been false advertising if the first iPhone hadn’t been the absolute phenomenon that it was. That’s literally how simple it is. Apple delivered.
I have exactly zero control over what these people do. They’re gonna do what they’re gonna do, and I have fuck all to do with it.
And don’t tell me we have influence en masse. If that were true, then this stuff wouldn’t be happening. Quite the opposite, clearly most people don’t want to look past the smoke and mirrors for the stuff they’re hyped about. (We’re all susceptible to this kind of thing).
A quote from 230+ years ago kind of sums it up nicely:
Happy will it be if our [decisions] should be directed by a judicious estimate of our true interests, unperplexed and unbiased by considerations not connected with the public good. But this is a thing more ardently to be wished than seriously to be expected.
He’s talking about public good, but you could insert any subject, eg. Perspective on a sales presentation (all of them are lies, to greater and lesser degrees).
I’m sure I could find similar quotes from the Stoics (~1000 years ago), Sun Tzu (~1900 years ago) or even Hammurabi (~3800 years ago), showing this ain’t new. It’s part of human nature.
Liars gonna lie, telling myself I can change that is just delusion, which gets me nowhere.
I agree, but what’s more, I am not trying to defend the behavior of Jobs here. But…to me anyway there is a material difference between say this, where the product did live up to the demo ultimately. In this case the demo was done on pre-release versions and so problems were expected and planned for.
Contrast this with say the cyber truck launch. Similar situation but 1. they failed to properly anticipate and plan for failure (broken window?) and 2. they made promises about wishes and desires, because the delivered product thus far does not live up to the promises.
The whole behavior is shitty to be sure, but I’d be ok going back to demos about planned yet achievable and deliverable features.
I think that’s kind of rhe point of these sorts to demos to begin with.
The company says we’re developing a product that, we are not ready to ship today, but will be this awesome. Give us some money and you can see how awesome it will be.
I generally assume that anything a company says about a product/service that is not shipping today is the best possible spin on the best version of what they’d like to sell. What you buy probably won’t be what is shown as an early demo
I think it is normal since the software wasnt ready for production yet; at work we also have forks and forks of forks just to demo new features for people. At the end he did deliver a working product unlike many game devs these days.
I have consistently been Luddish about moves like this (removign physical keyboard, eliminating phone jack, even the tablet form factor in general) but I think I was mostly wrong, and monimizing hardware features in favor of software seems to improve user experience.
I only disagree with the removal of 3.5mm and microSD ports, and removable batteries. Imo the ports are both 100% needed, and the battery would be nice though I understand waterproofing is important. I’m fine with screens and no physical keys, though I would like a camera cover switch for at least one of the two cameras if possible, like laptops are starting to have.
Can confirm. Worked at BioWare for ten years. They did a presentation at some big release event and they had the pc off stage with a pan of ice and a fan directly blowing on the open pc. Mmmhm it totally won’t melt your pc! They eventually fixed it, but video game announcement trailers are total smoke and mirrors typically.
While it’s a mistake to fake what you can’t build (I have cautionary tales about folks that did that), faking what you can and will build in order to build momentum to launch is not as uncommon as people might think.
Reminds me of Elizabeth Holmes. She really really believed it would be built. She just needed more time and money. Sometimes it’s a challenge to accept a failure, and move on.
i think Tesla’s and Elons cult is gonna be much different, he has succesfully alienated most of the so called “woke liberal” crowd with his fascists free speech absolutist sex offender shit, and then right wingers wont purchase his shit because they deny climate change and want their gas guzzlers, so he is stuck with the niche, crypto fun tech bros to worship him and his shitty “cars”
And he elegantly timef his shit to alienate his main purchase demographics to be at the time when the big automakers start coming out with their own offerings
Tesla will be a charging provider at best in a decade if they survive all the class action lawsuits over his fake claims that is
I didn’t like him either but not for such shenanigans. Any entrepreneur with half a brain would do the same in this situation and then nevertheless try to deliver a sound product after the presentation.
And then when you have issues with this kind of stuff when your own managers do it, they’ll just turn to you and say, “you don’t understand how business works”
You’re right, yes, business is a field made for liars.
Me: No, our performance is low and we don’t know why? We need to analyse it.
Boss: …but we’ve done what we said we’d do. We shouldn’t beat ourselves up over some metric. I think we’ve should say we’ve made it.
Net result is that we’ve pushed a major problem into the next phase without giving ourselves more time to do anything about it. …and people wonder why projects are “late” at the last moment.
“The Mythical Man-Month” is a book written in the 70s based on experiences from software development in the 60s, and project managers still cling to the myths about project planning it debunked conclusively.
They wanted to show what it could do in a perfect setting, so they would have connected it to a remote system in the back. You never trust tech to work flawlessly for a presentation as the risk is too high.
This is old news. We all know this. These were prototypes and still buggy but Steve knew he had to present it first, ASAP, to the public to earn and keep the excitement.
It was a gamble they worked. People were super exited and for months the anticipation built resulting in a strong launch with massive sales.
Even to this day, it’s that presentation they keeps the fans buying.
I wonder where we’d be if the iPhone was a flop. Android was well in development, but as an independent company, the success of the iPhone is what prompted Google to buy Android a year later
Yes but the first android prototype was a blackberry clone with horizontal tiny screen and all physical keyboard. The iPhone changed everything even if on paper was worse (no apps, ultra closed, expensive on contract)
For example only for the specs the HTC universal was better in every single part and it launched two years earlier. Bigger screen, higher resolution, full keyboard, lots of buttons, stylus, 3g modem, expandable memory, replaceable battery, an operating system that allowed to install any app. But then the user experience…
I don’t really think so. Google took another two years to release the HTC dream and at release was shipped in beta. If they were already developing a “touch first” handset it wouldn’t have been that long. They shipped the device without an on screen keyboard! It came only later with updates
And the start menù of win mobile 6.5 with the nice hexagons was just a nice menu, the rest of the os still required stylus and tiny buttons on those terrible resistive touch screens
People laughed their assess off at Bill Gates’s epic failed demo of usb on windows 95. Live on stage he plugged in a peripheral and the machine blue screened. No way in hell would Jobs have taken that risk.
Slow down your thinking and consider this: why would any practical person fully develop something without getting market feedback and understanding demand?
This is by the book “Preto-typing”. You can frame it as lying, but the reality is Apple had faith that all of the “faked” features in the demonstration would be fully developed before launch.
IBM did something similar before voice-to-text existed. They faked the technology during market research and discovered that people didn’t enjoy speaking to their computer as much as initially thought. It showed them that they could better invest that money elsewhere.
It would make zero sense and be a foolish use of capital to fully develop a product that complex and expensive without understanding market preferences.
The problem in all this for me, is that examples like Jobs are pointed to as examples of why this should be done (your entire post basically), and then we have examples like Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos who basically couldn’t deliver the technology and kept the “lie” going.
How does one know they can eventually deliver? In your post, you basically assume the problem is solvable with capital. With some promised tech (like Theranos), at what point does “there is a necessary need to gauge the publics interest in a product to evaluate if capital needs to be invested in this space” turn into fraud if the product turns out to be unattainable? (Think cancer cures, limb regeneration, etc)
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