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Comment by tokenadult | Hacker News Reader

Nothing busts my trust faster than lies. Indeed, the company mentioned as an example (Microsoft) lost my trust by overpromising and underdelivering with some releases of Windows back in the day.

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Jon Huntsman says the same thing in his book "Winners Never Cheat". Incidentally the company he started is a multi-billion dollar company, so I would not say it is essential to tell "soft lies" in order to succeed. He gives some good examples of how being honest helped him get ahead in the long run. My personal gut answer to these type of moral questions is that if you have to ask the question you (most likely) shouldn't do it.

I think this community is special in that regard. I feel the exact same way, and I'm sure a lot of other people here do as well. But the thing is that it works and it works well. Microsoft are doing incredibly well.

Apparently there are a lot of people out there who are easily convinced by lies, or marketing as some might want to call it.

But I'd suggest that the disappointment people felt with MS products was at least part of what spurred open office & ubuntu (for example) - and open source software certainly threatens MS's revenue stream.

... 20+ years later. Personally I couldn't live with doing business dishonestly, but you can't really say that it didn't work out well for Microsoft.

I agree - the point I was making was about damage to the long term franchise, which I guess an individual salesperson wouldn't care about.

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