Syncronys eventually filed for bankruptcy in July 1998 after releasing other poorly received tools. A large number of its creditors were customers who had not received their rebates for SoftRAM.
I wonder what the story was from the company perspective? Sounds like it just was a total fraud, but I can imagine a scenario where some programmer was ordered to build something that they didn't know how to implement and some manager told them to ship it anyway? I found this article about the bankruptcy [2] which has a priceless quote indicating total denial to the end:
Interestingly enough, two days before the company sought bankruptcy protection, Syncronys CEO Rainer Poertner was busy touting a new product called UpgradeAID 98 and claiming that the company's problems were history.
"It's been a really long time since SoftRAM 95. In the meantime the company has released 12 new products," he said on July 13. "We released a product in a rush with the release of Windows 95."
So far, UpgradeAID 98 has met with skepticism. The product is designed to allow consumer who upgrade their PCs to Windows 98 to revert back to Windows 95.
And this is hilarious:
Poertner, who was at lunch, could not be reached for comment.
Also, he exists! [3]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftRAM
[2] https://www.cnet.com/news/softram-95-maker-in-chapter-11/
It was supposedly the other way around. The programmer claimed he had in fact implemented it, and management claims they really thought they were shipping a real, working product.
I worked at a company that was also in the "utilities to improve system performance" niche. In 1997, we were showing our new program at Comdex. It was a finalist for a "Best Utility" Best of Comdex award from Byte, and Jerry Pournelle wrote a very positive review, and said it had his vote for Best Utility.
We were looking for a distributor for it, and a couple companies were interested. One was Syncronys. They could get it into a lot more stores, and promote it more effectively, than the others but we were concerned about trusting them after reading the revelations about SoftRAM.
We asked them to explain how the SoftRAM thing happened and were told about the programmer faking it. We would have been pretty skeptical of that explanation--it is almost always management that fakes things--except it turned out we knew that programmer (or rather, our founder knew him personally, and some of the rest of us knew of him) and it was quite believable that he was behind this.
Our company was our founder's second company. Let's call him F. His first had been a Mac utility company founded in 1984, founded with a partner (P) he had met when he took a couple years off from school to go work in Silicon Valley. When they started the company, F came back to Pasadena and hired a bunch of his Caltech friends and acquaintances on contract to get their first product out over the summer with him as chief engineer, and P stayed in SV to handle the business end of things while F stayed in Pasadena to code and run engineering.
P did not run the business honestly, and both F and those friends and acquaintances F hired ended up getting stiffed out of a significant fraction of what they were owed when the company fell apart and P disappeared with what money they did have.
As you've probably guessed by now, P ended up at Syncronys, where he was in charge of engineering and was the developer of SoftRAM.
By the time Syncronys was wanting to make a deal to distribute our software, they had gotten rid of P, and were just going to be a distributor of software developed by others.
We did end up, after much debate, going with Syncronys. They had more reach than the other distributor we were considering, and offered a better deal (probably because they needed something decent to help fix their reputation). (I don't remember if I agreed with this, or argued for going with the other distributor).
Things ended up working out OK going with Syncronys. There were some people apprehensive about buying something from them, but the reviews were good, and made it clear the product was real, and that it was not developed by Syncronys--they were just distributing a new product from another, established Windows utility company that had a good track record. As far as we could tell, that was enough to overcome most people's apprehension.