3 ms·

Another "old guy" story. I remember working for a very large telecommunications company one time. We had a new box that was supposed to speak a particular pro

Another "old guy" story. I remember working for a very large telecommunications company one time. We had a new box that was supposed to speak a particular protocol (I can't actually remember which protocol it was now -- long time ago). But we didn't finish it in time for the demo. So we had our box at the demo and underneath the table, covered by a cloth, we had our competitor's box. Our box wasn't connected to anything :-) We did the whole demo using the competitor's equipment. We fixed the problems a few months later and nobody was the wiser... I don't really want to work for that kind of company any more, but it makes for entertaining tales later on in life.

danpalmer 8y ago
Sounds a bit like Theranos and their use of off the shelf machines for analysing blood tests, instead of their magic one that didn't work yet.
- Ntrails 8y ago
  If they'd pulled it off within a few months of the faked presentations, and without sending false results to actual patients, it would have been a visionary CEO story rather than a criminally negligent one
  - danpalmer 8y ago
    Potentially, although I think it could still have caused plenty of controversy. It's one thing to use a competitor's product to demo your _equivalent_ product, but to somehow imply that your product is a step forward (smaller, lower power, faster, cheaper, etc) is quite different and even if you manage it in some form could still be grounds for calling it fraud.