Hype Vaporware, Go To Jail?

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?"

Already illegal

[Junks Jerzey]

This is already illegal for publicly traded companies. Just look at any press release and you'll see all the required legal disclaimers about "forward looking" information and all that. But you can still get into trouble by misleading shareholders.

Yes! Absolutely!

[alchemist68]

Would the world be better off or not if it was illegal to overpromote the functionality or features of software?"

The world would be a much better (happier users) and safer (less security risks). The Borg would lose its monopoly if people really knew how badly engineered Microsoft software is put together. I'm not trying to be a troll, but everyone here on Slashdot knows that M$, for a while, was coming out with weekly security updates for Internet Explorer and Internet Information Server. Even the US government hinted that M$ better get its act together and repair its flawed products after 9/11, saying that our information infrastructure was at risk to attacks. Apple seems to do a better job of weeding out the bugs before the public en mass downloads any updates to Mac OS X. And Apple is certainly much faster at fixing known bugs in its software. Look at how fast it was in clearing up the iTunes internet sharing flaw - one week to get the update out, only to be thwarted again by the UNIX heads playing around with port numbers, etc... At least the music is "protected" from sharing not "in the know".

In the UK, you're apparently not allowed to market

[Sean80]

Amazingly, I discovered the other day that, in the UK, you're not allowed to specifically say that your product is better than some other company's. Instead, you apparently just have to go on about how great your own product is. Now if that doesn't take the heart and soul out of marketing, then I don't know what does.

I suppose you have to break down the argument into what a product -does- and what benefits it will give you. Perhaps lying about the actual features of a product is bad, but it seems a much more difficult problem to sort out who's lying about what the benefits of the existing features are. What beer isn't supposed to make you a sex god? Which software product isn't going to save you millions of dollars? Which car ad is going to tell you in big, bold letters on the screen that driving like that is going to get you some pretty serious jail time? Flat-out lies right there, but how could you call the companies on this?

If you're not allowed to hyperbolize about your product, then the entire marketing industry is doomed. I'm pretty damn sure that the folks at McDonalds couldn't give a flying proverbial at a rolling donut whether I'm smiling or not.....

Re:Definition of Vaporware?

[Tim Macinta]

There used to be an excellent description of vaporware and why it is so damaging on Caldera's (aka, SCO's) website. It was also very damning of Microsoft and it seemed to have dropped off the net in 2001 (draw your own conclusions on how related those two points are to each other and to the the recent "licensing" done by Microsoft of "SCO's" Unix rights). Thankfully, you can still grab a copy from the Wayback Machine [archive.org]. The write-up is still good even if Caldera isn't.

Note: the link points to an old copy of drdos.com. Dr-Dos was recently sold to some other company, but the vaporware paper was taken down long before that.