Tech can move away from 'swindle culture'
venturebeat.com
venturebeat.com
> Scams have been around as long as technology, and even the original Apple iPhone demo was completely faked. The mock-up didn’t work at all; Steve Jobs followed a carefully constructed choreography to mislead his audience into thinking it did
This is totally false. The iPhone demo wasn’t a mock-up. It was alpha software that worked to do exactly the things that were demonstrated. Of course there was some choreography to avoid known bugs as there is in any demo, but in fact Jobs did deviate from the script, scaring the developers who were present, but it didn’t crash.
If the author is willing to lie outright about this story or unwilling to do even basic fact checking, then nothing in the story can be trusted.
The fraud comes when it's something like theranos that lies about the existence of a technology their product depends on. If their blood test tech was proven and rock solid and they mocked up a UI for it, that would be fine, as there is no magic that needs to come true for it to work.
That's why tech has a big element of "fake it till you make it". Say, Airbnb or uber were obviously doable software-wise, and so if you have an idea like that there's little harm in presenting the software as being as far along as you can, so you can get the signups you need to scale. That's ok in my books (it's obviously still fraud to trick investors, but confidence in low-risk software that's not finished is not really an issue).
The problem occurs when people don't understand the distinction between software tech debt and fundamental tech or research risk, and treat them the same. This is what the author of the article appears to do