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.