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Most Outrageous Vendor Lie Ever Told?
i8msft writes "CIO published a guide on How To Cut Through Vendor Hype. While light, the article did prompt me to wonder what is the most outrageous lie ever told by a vendor? I mean, in person, face to face, preferably with witnesses (boss, coworkers, someone on your side of the fence). Forget press releases, trade show presentations and the like, where they lie like dogs! Specific examples only, please."
"Duke Nukem will be out by the end of the year. No, we promise. Not lying this time!"
JoeLinux
Daikatana.
"Easy self assemble...."
"This new Athlon XP 2100+ with 512 megs of ram 160 GIG HD, G-force 4, DVD rewritable will help you get laid!" It was a cruel lie! I will never believe salesman again ;o(
I know it's overused, but hey it's valid.
"Evil will always triumph because good is dumb." -- Dark Helmet
Slashcode. ;)
-- Is "Sig" copyrighted by www.sig.com?
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I don't know if I could ever trust a company with the word "Wang" in it's name.
"I'm sorry you're having problems, ma'am. Our computers are reliable and we rarely recieve customer complaints." - Me when I worked for Dell.
["Marge, I agree with you - in theory. In theory, communism works. In theory." - Homer]
The guy in my local computer games store telling me I should replace my ps2 with an XBox because 'Microsoft are far more reliable at fixing bugs and delivering patches' and apparently 'No, they wouldn't charge gamers for said updates or release an in-compatible games box in 6 months to replace it'
Yup, that's what the salesman told us back in 1984 or 1985 in some computer store downtown NYC.
... you know ... you can write your own operating system ... I did."
... only he voice his "... hey, if you can write an operating system, what are you doing here ?"
My friend/co-worker, Mike X. decided to go to CompuLand or something like that, to see the new line of PC clones. When we got to the store, someone straight out of Saturday Night Fever began to pitch us a system with the integrity of a used car salesmen.
When we started asking questions about the operating system, he perceptively asked us, with a wonderfully Broolynese accent "... you guys are programmers, right ?"
He went on, now with a bit of body English "... well I'm a programmer, you're a programmer
Appearently Mike had the same thought at the same moment I did
Needless to say, the salesguy left us alone from therein.
healyourchurchwebsite.com - WWJB?
A few months ago I moved to where I currently live. I called Comcast (the only cable company choice here) and asked if cable modems were available. After getting my address the service rep on the line replied "Absolutely. Would you like to setup cable service now?"
Happy, I went through the process of setting up an account. I was told that once the cable was installed, I could call back and setup the cable modem account.
A week later, cable installed, I call back. "Sorry, they aren't available yet". hmm. I asked when they would be. "Next week." I was disappointed, but hey, only a week.
I called back a week later. Now it was a month. I called back a month later, now they weren't sure, and I got a "Well, people in that call center don't know what they are talking about."
Two months later I call back. Still not available. By this point I had DSL installed (a whole 'nother story). I made one final call to get them to remove service (The only reason I got it to begin with was because of the cable modem!)
BTW, the whole time this was going on, several neighbors and I were all getting fliers from Comcast to sign up for cable modem service.
It appears Ockham lost his razor and grew a beard.
"It will reduce the 'skin effect' for better sound, and the arrows on the side indicate that it should be plugged in in that direction, because the electrons flow better that way." -- pimply 18 year old at The Good Guys
~Loren
You can say it's a bug, for me it's a feature :)
1: a massive 16K of RAM (1980)
2: a massive 512K of RAM (1985)
3: a massive 8M of RAM (1991)
4: a massive 128M of RAM (1996)
5: a massive 1.5G of RAM (this weekend)
When all our base are clearly not belong to you.
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
Microsoft touting "Zero Administration" when Windows NT 4.0 came out. My boss was like "we'll save so much!!! I can't even project the numbers!"... tisk tisk. Good thing I told him to wait until the marketing hype died ;-)
My dad ran across an advertisement for a sewing machine in the newspaper once. It had a special feature: "an automatic buttholer".
My dad never did by the machine, but I have a feeling they were lying when they said it had a feature to automatically butthole something.
"Derp de derp."
While improving the code on a client's website, I became suspicious of the credit card validation code. The setup was that a user would get sent offsite to the credit card validation service. They would enter their credit card details and the validation service would process the card, bill the user, and then send an activation code to my client's website. Recieving the activation code was confirmation that the credit card was legit and the user was a paying customer.
The problem was that the authorization code was always the same. In fact, according to the validation service's spec, the code was always '0000'. And all the codes were sent via the web pages the user accessed as HTML hidden variables. One could (and I did) build dummy HTML pages that simply sent the authorization code to the website, bypassing the validation service, and recieving all the goodies reserved for paying customers.
So I went to see the validation service people to explain to them their non-existant securtity model. And they acknowledged the problem and said they would have it fixed promptly. And if you believe that, boy have I got a bridge you'ld love to have!
First they claimed that since the code was a 'hidden variable' no one could see it.
After I built the dummy page in front of them (in friggin notepad), they claimed that I didnt get all the authentication codes in and they were sending 'secret, invisible' authorization codes that didn't appear on the web pages. Nevermind the fact if I, as the website programmer, couldn't access those 'secret, invisible' authorization codes I couldn't well check for them to autheticate users could I?
Then, they claimed that only people like me could do it, and that I was a Hacker (captial H, please). And, don't you know, Hackers arent allowed to access the validation service.
It was really bad. I ended up yelling at their chief programmer and calling him a liar to his face before they finally stopped stonewalling.
Similar issue:
Got a project from a client - well, half a project. We got the 'web' half, and the other team got the 'database' half. The database was SQL7, but that team said it had to be upgraded to SQL2000 - they'd handle the whole thing.
For some reason, the first 7 weeks we weren't allowed to know who the other team was. Turns out they were down the road from us. Well, we coded against the spec we were given. They didn't. They 'upgraded' the SQL7 to SQL2000 database.
Guess how? Using the 'upgrade' wizard which would have taken about 20 minutes? Nope - they apparently recreated everything by hand. About 50 tables, maybe 20-30 columns each. This apparently took them 8 weeks. Oh, yeah, this was the best part:
Every column in every table was VARCHAR(50). Didn't matter what it used to be.
*THEY* got paid. *WE* got stuck essentially recreating/upsizing the SQL7 -> 2000 database (absolutely no reason to, except that that's the only DB they now had) and had to do that in about 2 days while debugging the code we were working on.
VARCHAR(50). For everything.
creation science book
I remember a great article on burning CDs in an audiophile magazine.
After the expected disclaimers about the limited quality of CDs, etc, they proceeded to review the options for media, burners, configuration options, etc. Then, as expected, came the result of their listening tests. Although the differences were subtle, the best quality was obtained by using the most expensive drive, with the most expensive gold media, set on 1x recording speed.
The kicker came near the end, where the author noted that "even though all of the CDs we burned were bit-for-bit identical when compared on our computer, the bits on CDs produced with less expensive recorders or at higher recording speeds had dirtier edges, and repeated copying further degraded the quality of the bits".
"Nobody will ever need more than 640K RAM!" -- Bill Gates, 1981
"Windows 95 needs at least 8 MB RAM." -- Bill Gates, 1996
"Nobody will ever need Windows 95. -- logical conclusion
"If he thinks he can hide and run from the United States and our allies, he's sorely mistaken." Bush on bin Laden
I wish I was home to post this a few hours ago - probably nobody will see this now.
One time I was at a conference sponsered by HP, Netscape, SCO and Oracle. It was called "UNIX in the Year 2000" (this was in 1998 or something). This took place in Israel. Netscape, SCO and Oracle sent some top-dog public-speakers from their European divisions, all of which gave great talks (even Oracle!)
HP had some guy from the Israeli vendors.
He was asked when HP is going to support 64-bit computing.
His answer: "64-bit is SLOWER than 32-bit! With 64-bit there's DOUBLE the memory to go through, so it takes the program TWICE AS LONG to do anything!!!"
Yes, caps and exclemation marks and all - the guy was YELLING at the person who asked the question. And he said this in front of HUNDREDS of highly experienced UNIX guys.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is kinky.
One of the (many) times that I had occasion to contact Iomega's technical support department due to a non-functioning drive, it went something like this:
Me: My drive makes strange noises when I put in a disk.
Iomega Rep: Is your Zip drive within 6 feet of your monitor?
Me: Why yes, it is?
Iomega Rep: Well, that could be the problem.
Me: Interesting...well, the cord that came with the drive is only 2 feet long. Should I try stretching it?
Needless to say, I eventually had to send it back. The one good thing I can say about Zip drives...the one year warranty never expires! You get a new one every 6-9 months when the old one dies.
"Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!"
You mean, like MSDOS?
-- this is not a sig.
My favorite line from Microsoft will always be one of the blurbs from the Win95 installation:
"Everything you do will be more fun"
"At the game developers conference, Sun is releasing a white paper on their new "Java Games Profile." Their ultimate goal? To have one CD you could pop into an Xbox, a PS2, a Windows machine, or a Linux machine, and play the same game on them all. If they get full support for it I can finally get rid of that windows gaming partition!"
Ah, yes... The shareware rack. I never got suckered into that, I had a blazing fast 14.4k modem, so I just downloaded all the shareware from my local BBSes.
However, I once saw one of those racks at Future Shop. On the back of every package was the phrase "Hermetically sealed to prevent viruses!"
Had a good laugh about that one.
A long time ago, I interviewed with a company that made electronic cash registers. We were chatting at the end of the interview and I mentioned my best computer salesmen story. Well, they one-upped me with this:
The salesman had taken one of the few prototypes they had to a demo at a large hotel chain. The demo is going well and then one of the hotel people asks the question, "Will it pass the Coke test?". The salesman doesn't have a clue what the Coke test is, but in true salesman form, he answers "Yes." The hotel buyer proceeds to pick up a can of Coke, pop the tab and dump it down the keyboard of the very expensive prototype... Needless to say, that prototype never worked again. The real amazing part of the story is that the Hotel bought a lot of them -- with the newly designed rubber matt over the keyboard... I gather that particular salesman never made up answers to questions after that, too...
An engineer who ran for Congress. http://herbrobinson.us
1985: a California graphics board manufacturer - I wrote firmware. The products actually shipped with a manual that said "This manual says what our product actually does, no matter what the salesman may have told you it does".
Need Mercedes parts ?