What I attach to here is the idea that buzz comes from very rapid assessments made by a target audience.

It's such a classic engineering mistake to demo their perfect casino server with crappy graphics on the front-end: I've made that mistake many times.

Engineers frequently fail to understand what non-engineers care about and need. Anyway, I like the general ideas he presents, but I think that his film and casino project stories would have been really different if rather than sending something that had all the technical guts in place, they sent something flashy which still needed plumbing work.

In the case of the movie, this could have been 10 minutes of awesomeness.

In the case of the casino thing, this could have been a cheapo flash demo made by some uber-designer, with a lot of handwaving on the back-end.

Both of these would have yielded better results than showing real state of the projects.

I guess I believe that nobody cares about plumbing except plumbers / engineers. Unless engineers are going to buy your product (and they'll still likely have to demo it for a non-engineer to get a purchase okay), I think it makes a huge amount of sense to aim for some initial flash.

Probably nobody needs this advice more than me, so I'm going to read it back to myself every day for a week in the hopes that it will stick..