Really? Claiming to have invented the most well know and also the worst software development process is honest? It's a bold-faced lie written only to get clients.
One can only imagine what actually happens in communication once they have a client. If the marketing is a complete lie, then I can't imagine the company itself can be trusted.
I mostly agree. They're selling a development platform. You could look at this at marketing fluff aimed at stroking the egos of their prospective customers.
Yeah you have a point. But as a technically apt person, I ignore the marketing speak and look this stuff up. It's published all over their blogs, podcasts, etc. They have great developer relations and there's tons of info out there.
Their specific claims designed to be misleading but barely vague enough to not be an outright lie go farther than just marketing imho. For example: "weak PBKDF2 implementations have made other password managers vulnerable". This isn't marketing a la "we make an industry-leading product", it's insinuating that a significant portion of competitors are using insecure tech.
It is definitely a marketing gimmick on some level. They claimed an entirely open source laptop which is a complete and total lie. They are making good progress in one way, but still destroying trust in another.
It's great that they showed a demo tracking a disease
outbreak, but that doesn't really mean anything.
The company readily admits that their software has primarily been used in the defense and finance industries. They don't hide this fact, nor should they feel pressured to.
I'm not crucifying anybody, I was just pointing out that the OP's speculation was based on slightly more than just the name alone (but I agree, it's still pretty weak).
It doesn't make it less bullshitty. It changes that fact that it wasn't only a zealous fan driving up some excitement, they are doing it themselves. Well,I don't like it. I don't like when tech companies selling to developers mislead them or make over-inflated statements. Let 2am infomercials do that. MongoDB was (is?) in the same category, and I don't trust them and don't like their product.
Can you imagine Linus writing the new kernel version announcement like that -- "This kernel release will run anywhere. It will radically change how you look at the world. It might bring about peace too". What over-inflated claims do is break trust. If they are marketing for non-technical people, yes general statements work. Marketing to other technical people using claims like that is patronizing and disappointing.
I find that it's easy to get a proof-of-concept together. The challenging thing is getting all the details right for a working product. Or, to put it mildly, people who don't understand easily confuse a demo with a working product.
It's probably just a proof of concept that doesn't work very well. They probably just played back one of the few attempts that it worked very well.
I even remember, when reading the article, a lot of caution in overestimating the state of the technology. So, given their disclaimer, I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt; and I'm thinking that everyone else overreacted because they don't understand software development.
FWIW, I don't think "it's marketing" is a valid excuse for them saying things that aren't true. It's not a "new kind of shell" because it's mimicking things that already exist. The author even knows about those things and cites them.
I do not accept the idea that it's okay to make false claims to create a narrative, marketing or otherwise.
Right: Assuming good faith, this project seems completely backwards.
But if their real product is the telemetry that also ships with it, and they've identified that many newbie developers have a hard time seeing through marketing pages directed at developers (eg like "webscale" stuff from mongodb circa 2010), then it, unfortunately, makes more sense.
I mean, at a minimum, their habit of using customer data from their platform businesses to inform development of their own competing products is pretty sketchy.
That's a pretty nice question. If that response was intended for a non-technical audience, I could said that the company was expecting it to be believed. But it was posted directly on HN, so I have no idea.
If it does actually work, I'd hardly call that an illusion. You're right that businesses (and the end users!) are typically not interested in implementation details though.
This article makes a lot of extraordinary claims. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
In this case, that means a reputable tech reporter from a reputable publication has to say "this is the real deal" before these guys can be taken seriously.
(I'm not doubting that they have any tech, it's just that they seem to be promising something with no downsides, which in most cases means a marketing team has spun out of control.)
Well, everything else can be waived as marketing-speak. From a cursory glance it looked like the landing page for a small team that came up with some cool compression technology and then got some marketing wiz-kid to throw up a webpage. Everything except the technological claims I could just disregard.
Like anything, you gotta dig a little deeper if you want know what something actually is.
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