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this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2023
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This is old news, and perfectly normal for stage work.
I know it's already normalized, but...
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.
Oh, I agree with you! And I'm sure we can have this discussion about almost any current product launch, too.
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.
Positive false hype can deceive people into wasting money.
And they shouldn't. It's just another way of saying "people acting rationally based on truthful information"
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.
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 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.