Because contrary to popular belief, people are only finitely foolish But in fact this did happen to some extent. LTO tapes used to advertise with 2:1 compressi

Because contrary to popular belief, people are only finitely foolish But in fact this did happen to some extent. LTO tapes used to advertise with 2:1 compression ratio. Then that became 2.5:1. And now IBM is doing 3:1 And that's not because we just discovered how to improve on Lempel-Ziv. The switch to 2.5:1 was around 2012. LZMA is 20th century tech, and people still use gzip today. Compression technology doesn't account for the advertising number inflation there.