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Hype Vaporware, Go To Jail?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the does-what-it-says-on-the-tin dept.

Tim Dierks writes "The New York Times (registration required) has an article describing a federal case against executives in Enron's broadband data division, based upon the charge that Enron claimed that a software platform was more complete and more functional than it actually was. It seems to be that if this case holds up, most of the software industry is guilty. Would the world be better off or not if it was illegal to overpromote the functionality or features of software?"

1 of 369 comments (clear)

  1. Well... by Da_Biz · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'd be curious to see, specifically, what the "functionality" the case is talking about. I was the lead QA engineer for a time on the Broadband Streaming Media platform.

    The organization had a LOT of sharp engineers. Unfortunately, the management was completely incompetent and didn't allow many of the better engineers to have a say in functional requirements/technical specifications.

    There was also a disturbingly bad attitude that pervaded the works at EBS as well. Case in point: during one meeting, I made the point that the service level metrics they were using were horribly vague. I didn't believe we should do business like that (goodwill is, I think, an important concept in business), but their response was "oh, if they'res a problem, we'll just sick our lawyers on them." Assholes.