As a former employee of Sunncomm, I can tell you that unethical business practices and misleading claims were practically the company charter. The CTO regularly made promises to the record industry without even bothering to see if it could be done. Then demanded that the developers somehow make it work anyway in an unreasonable time frame because it was going straight to mass production. Most of the 3rd party technology they tried to incorporate was proven questionable to useless in testing (what little was ever done), but they included it anyway assuring the record execs that it worked just fine. For example, their claims that the software worked on Mac was based on 1 test computer running an old version of the OS, using a version of Windows Media Player that had been taken out of circulation by MS so long ago that it was impossible to obtain another copy from anywhere. The software was being tested on a system that would not and could not exist anywhere in the outside world! In fact, the reason for this Frankenstein setup was because they couldn't get it to work on any up to date Mac setup. They kept using this one system to test just so they could say that it was tested and working on Mac!
Most of the employees were fired at one point or another for not being able to meet unreasonable demands (including me). You really want some interesting reading, check out the CEO's past history including some of the court cases against him in previous companies he's run.
Oh, and we often laughed at the fact that all of the employees spent their day listening to pirated music while we worked. Don't even get me started on they day we found 27 GIGs of porn on the CFO's pc.:P
As bad as Sony is, it's nothing compared to the sleesy people selling them snake oil.
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As a former employee of Sunncomm, I can tell you that unethical business practices and misleading claims were practically the company charter. The CTO regularly made promises to the record industry without even bothering to see if it could be done. Then demanded that the developers somehow make it work anyway in an unreasonable time frame because it was going straight to mass production. Most of the 3rd party technology they tried to incorporate was proven questionable to useless in testing (what little was ever done), but they included it anyway assuring the record execs that it worked just fine. For example, their claims that the software worked on Mac was based on 1 test computer running an old version of the OS, using a version of Windows Media Player that had been taken out of circulation by MS so long ago that it was impossible to obtain another copy from anywhere. The software was being tested on a system that would not and could not exist anywhere in the outside world! In fact, the reason for this Frankenstein setup was because they couldn't get it to work on any up to date Mac setup. They kept using this one system to test just so they could say that it was tested and working on Mac! Most of the employees were fired at one point or another for not being able to meet unreasonable demands (including me). You really want some interesting reading, check out the CEO's past history including some of the court cases against him in previous companies he's run. Oh, and we often laughed at the fact that all of the employees spent their day listening to pirated music while we worked. Don't even get me started on they day we found 27 GIGs of porn on the CFO's pc. :P
As bad as Sony is, it's nothing compared to the sleesy people selling them snake oil.