This made me chuckle:

> Then someone had a brilliant idea: we would ship US Sprint a blank tape with our usual letter listing the changes in the release.

...preceded by...

> Our relationship with US Sprint was always iffy, and one day we pissed them off one time too many and they canceled their contract

Well, yeah. If your company depends on a small number of large customers, you really can't get away with pulling nonsense like the blank tape trick on them. People aren't idiots.