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Comment by chrsig | Hacker News Reader

I'm not completely convinced. I'm sure it always helps, and I'm sure in many cases it's a necessity in order to sell the product.

I'd like to believe that there are some products that are good enough and solve pressing enough issues so as to sell themselves. It's probably a naive hope, but I like to cling to it.

I wish there were enough honesty in sales as to not leave such a sour taste.

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In days of yore, I worked for a company where the product basically did "sell itself".

Over 90% of people who did a demo/trial run bought the product.

Sadly, technology progressed, and the entire market went away. The same "Magic Quadrant"/Market space that Gartner made explicitly because of that product was retired some time back due to not being relevant.

What product space is that?

I think the best way to handle that sour taste is to make a product that actually lives up to sales hype.

I get the rationale, but it's disproportionately easy to oversell a product than live up to sales hype. I'm assuming a scenario where sales hype is on the verge of being detached from reality. It's an abuse of both customer trust and developer trust.

There's probably some flip side of the coin where sales is being honest about what they were _told_ was delivered, but the product doesn't in actuality live up to what was committed to. In which case the development team should either up their QA standard or adjust what they've committed to developing.

I'm sure there's some possible healthy relationship where there's some sales hype that's used to motivate product improvement, but I haven't personally experienced it.

The Oracle model that everyone copied was “Oversell and eventually you can hire the engineers to make your product actually better than the competition”

It worked so well (where are Sybase and the other RDBMS makers?) that everyone else copied the playbook.

For intangible products with high switching costs it’s just more profitable for vendors to lie.

This low integrity process has taken me a long time to come to grips with, and makes me especially prudent as a buyer.

Apologies, but in my experience in the IT realm, I find this hope to be so naive as to be dangerous.

The possible silver lining is that there still exist millions of good problems to solve. But never ever expect solutions to be self-evident.

I certainly understand why you think it's naive -- I even think it's naive, and it's my hope. I don't understand how it's dangerous though, would you mind expanding on that?

> But never ever expect solutions to be self-evident.

I certainly don't _expect_ anything. I just hope that there are products out there that don't need sleazy sales tactics, and let the product show it's worth

hope != expectation. i expect to live a life with no shortage of disappointment ;)

Dangerous may be an overstatement, but maybe not: I think what I was really trying to say was something along the lines of:

In my opinion, right now in IT, "laypeople" don't have a good understanding of how bad things are in many respects, and how much better they could be in others. Moreover, there are a lot of effective "salespeople" in this space, and all this adds up to what I believe is a huge gap in perception and reality here. So the last thing I want is more belief that great IT comes along and saves us?

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