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."

Comments

We had a sales man from ...

[crovira]

Wang Mini Computer Systems sell a top of the l;ive 2200 system and neglect to tell the guy he sold it to, a drug store owner, that it had to be programmed.

The guy took it, put in a wood shed out behing his little counrtyu drugstore and left it there for a couple of years until it finally got reposessed and made its way to our software firm where we were programming Wang 2200 machine (in BASIC. :-)

I met that salesman and he was an absolute sleaze.

Talk about selling a pig in a poke.

Re:We make a secure Operating System

[xmedar]

Thats pitiful, I remember a former company I worked for spending many many thousands on being a member of MSDN so we could get access to "All the latest info", and surprise! When we needed docs for all those undocumented APIs, they told us to buy a source code licence, forgeting that they had already told us we would have access to the info we wanted through MSDN, they wanted an extra $500K if I recall, and I know of others this happened to, but somehow I can't see a line-item on any M$ accounts that says "Fraud"

Microsoft Lies

[Tim Macinta]

I've assembled a few of Microsoft's most outrageous lies at:

http://www.kmfms.com/whatsbad.html#deception

They've really churned out more material than I can keep track of (I have a large back-log of links to add to this list), but there are some good ones there. The funniest one on the list (IMO) is the interview where Bill Gates is quoted as saying Microsoft software has no bugs.

MS vs Korn

[xueexueg]

I think this is what he's talking about. Pretty funny:

http://wigner.cped.ornl.gov/the-gang/1999-01/139 6. html

I've been attending the USENIX NT and LISA NT (Large Installation
Systems Administration for NT) conference in downtown Seattle this week.
One of those magical Microsoft moments(tm) happened yesterday and I
thought that I'd share. Non-geeks may not find this funny at all, but
those in geekdom (particularly UNIX geekdom) will appreciate it.

Greg Sullivan, a Microsoft product manager (henceforth MPM), was
holding forth on a forthcoming product that will provide Unix style
scripting and shell services on NT for compatibility and to leverage
UNIX expertise that moves to the NT platform. The product suite
includes the MKS (Mortise Kern Systems) windowing Korn shell, a
windowing PERL, and lots of goodies like awk, sed and grep. It actually
fills a nice niche for which other products (like the MKS suite)
have either been too highly priced or not well enough integrated.

An older man, probably mid-50s, stands up in the back of the room
and asserts that Microsoft could have done better with their choice of
Korn shell. He asks if they had considered others that are more
compatible with existing UNIX versions of KSH.

The MPM said that the MKS shell was pretty compatible and should be
able to run all UNIX scripts.

The questioner again asserted that the MKS shell was not very
compatible and
didn't do a lot of things right that are defined in the KSH
language spec.
The MPM asserted again that the shell was pretty compatible and
should
work quite well.

This assertion and counter assertion went back and forth for a bit,
when another fellow member of the audience announced to the MPM that the
questioner was, in fact David Korn of AT&T (now Lucent) Bell Labs.
(David Korn is the author of the Korn shell).

Uproarious laughter burst forth from the audience, and it was one
of the only times that I have seen a (by then pink cheeked) MPM lost for
words or momentarily lacking the usual unflappable confidence. So,
what's a body to do when Microsoft reality collides with everyone elses?

The Win95 rollout

[TheSHAD0W]

I think this belongs, despite the fact that Bill Gates was actually speaking the truth when he said, a few days before the roll-out of Windows 95, that people needing tech support from Microsoft would never be kept on hold for longer than an hour.

Yup, it was the literal truth. Anyone who called Microsoft waited on hold, and then, after 59 minutes, they were cut off.

Computer Speaker Wattage Ratings

[BigBlockMopar]

Advertised "250 watt" computer speakers which weigh three pounds and are powered off a 9V 300mA AC adapter.

P = E x I, where P is power in watts, E is electromotive force in volts, and I is current in amperes.

1 amp = 1000mA. You do the math.

A real 200 watt power amplifier will generally have a power supply with a transformer which weighs at least 50 pounds, and that's *per channel*.

And they use the term "PMPO" - "Peak Music Power Output". Fine, putting aside the fact that this term has no accepted definition in electrical engineering - let's say that those little Taiwanese-made speakers contain an amplifier with a big bank of capacitors to dump out enough current to achieve 250 watts peak. If the power supply to them is only 9V, the capacitors would never get above 9V. If the speakers themselves have a standard nominal impedance of 8 ohms, then we can calculate.

A simple application of Ohm's Law reveals that 9V into 8 ohms could yield a maximum current of (I = E/R) 1.125 amps. 1.125 amps at 9 volts shows 10.125 watts absolute peak. And in real world situations, we must include the on-state resistance of all the transistors in the output stages.

10.125W < 250W. Therefore, they are lying. By a factor of almost 25.

Wattage ratings tend to be utter lies with any consumer electronics, especially car audio equipment and boom boxes. The absolute worst come from tiny little Chinese sweatshops making brands of computer speakers that no one has ever heard of.

My computer's sound system includes a pair of Acoustic Research AR-4x bookshelf speakers driven off a highly modified Sound A-5000 power amplifier. B+ to the output stages is 45V DC derived from a 10 pound power supply transformer, and it does produce a solid and stable 25W RMS per channel into 8 ohms, using a 1kHz sinewave driving a resistive load. And that's the accepted standard for wattage ratings of real power amplifiers.

As a former professional sound technician who has done lead sound for Garth Brooks, Harry Belafonte, and The Three Tenors at such prestigious venues at the SkyDome, I've frequently used 240 watt power amplifiers from companies like ElectroVoice, Crown and QSC to power stage monitors on 5000 square foot stages. I speak from experience that running some of this stuff in your house will make your nose bleed. You're not gonna tell me with inflated numbers that a set of $19.95 at Fry's computer speakers will do the same thing.

There's no shame in admitting that a given computer speaker system has a rating of 1W RMS per channel, but idiot consumers just buy the biggest number they can find. In reality, it takes four times the power to double the volume.

Jeez, it's almost as bad as the horsepower ratings on new cars...