Comment by JohnFen
2 years ago
> Everyone fudges demo's
No, not everyone fudges demos. But some do, and Google has a track record of it.
That said, it's common enough that I view all demos -- and especially those that I'm not seeing live in person -- with deep skepticism.
They are so commonly 'fake' that it is just an accepted industry trope.
I've fallen for enough over-promised demo's that I now have hard time accepting anything.
The question is, why does Google get hammered so hard for them?
There must be something like human error-bars.
You can fake to a certain extent, and we'll all nod and cut you some slack for the cool demo.
But fake it just a little too far, and then everyone is like 'ok man, that is just too fake'.
https://www.lifehacker.com.au/2018/05/pretty-much-all-tech-d...
"" The movie Steve Jobs dramatises this famous fakery. The scene is set in the frantic moments just before Jobs presents the original Macintosh to the world in 1984. The Macintosh 128K can’t say “hello” as Jobs demands, so Apple engineer Andy Hertzfeld suggests using a more powerful 512K, which would not be available until later in 1984.
And it’s what actually happened. “We decided to cheat a little,” the real Hertzfeld confirmed on his site Folklore. They really did switch out the machine so the demo would work.
The on-stage demonstration Apple pioneered has since produced all manner of theatrics, some brilliant and some ham-handed, and all in their own ways not exactly real. Microsoft’s recent “workplace” demos at its Build developer conference are very clearly a dramatisation.
Last year a man, hard hat at a cocky angle, strode across stage and pretended to use construction equipment wrong to show how Microsoft’s AI could identify and tag unsafe practices on a worksite. It was so garishly theatrical I don’t think anyone genuinely thought it was real. ""
FAANGS have historically been shameless about this kind of lying.
> The question is, why does Google get hammered so hard for them?
I don't think Google gets hammered any harder than, say, Apple does for this sort of thing. But Google seems to fake demos a lot more than other FAANGs do (or perhaps they're less competent about hiding their misbehavior).