The time-honored way to do demos, is to show a lashed-up, duct-tape-and-baling-wire abomination, in a carefully controlled setting.
I have seen companies plant shills in the audience, to generate those "random questions."
The best was when I attended the "Longhorn" demo, at Microsoft (Longhorn became Vista).
The marketing person gave this great demo of all the eye-candy UI, and kept saying "This is live code."
Then, at the end of the demo, you could actually see him, closing the Director show. The rest of the demos did not have the eye candy.
Vista turned out great!
I'm not really a fan of MVPs, but I understand why they are so attractive.
I have long "beta" periods, if I need the same thing.
In the end, I feel that we need to take risks, just like any other product manufacturer. Our product may be a hit, or it may be a flop, but I'm not a fan of officially releasing lashups.
Let's be clear, there is nothing wrong with a rigged demo. A rigged demo is no different than a magic show. Folks love magic shows.
However, there is a big difference between a rigged demo and lying to the audience. All of those slide decks, static screens with "just one button that works", "demos on rails", they're all legit. It's ok to talk hopes, dreams, future capabilities, and what it should be capable of. But you can't (shouldn't) do that and tell them that "this'll be done next week". Shouldn't give false expectations.
It's a fine line, to be sure, but it's marketing. You can have honest marketing without highlighting all the ways you currently fall short. Everyone needs to do due diligence. A rigged demo may seem like 3 Card Monty, but it's not. 3 Card Monty is designed to deceive. A rigged demo is designed to highlight and exemplify. Yes, there is a difference.
In the end, the hard questions will come, and you need to be prepared to answer them honestly. If they don't come, you should be upfront about them. Address unsaid concerns. But that doesn't disqualify the use of the "rigged demo".
> Then, at the end of the demo, you could actually see him, closing the Director show. The rest of the demos did not have the eye candy.
Showing a video of a demo is in itself not a bad thing - that's often done when you want to show early builds or even a patchwork of work across multiple builds.
Depending on when you saw the Longhorn demo, it might be inaccurate to say that Longhorn became Vista. I worked at Microsoft (not on Windows) back then and saw some flashy demos of eye-candy UI in the 2003 timeframe that never launched, except as a beta build that was given out to external developers late 2003 at the PDC (conference). The original Longhorn, demo-ed at PDC 2003, was abandoned in mid-2004 and was pivoted to the Windows 2003 codebase. A lot of the features originally planned / demo-ed for Longhorn (new filesystem, XAML-based UI etc) never shipped.
The time-honored way to do demos, is to show a lashed-up, duct-tape-and-baling-wire abomination, in a carefully controlled setting.
I have seen companies plant shills in the audience, to generate those "random questions."
The best was when I attended the "Longhorn" demo, at Microsoft (Longhorn became Vista).
The marketing person gave this great demo of all the eye-candy UI, and kept saying "This is live code."
Then, at the end of the demo, you could actually see him, closing the Director show. The rest of the demos did not have the eye candy.
Vista turned out great!
I'm not really a fan of MVPs, but I understand why they are so attractive.
I have long "beta" periods, if I need the same thing.
In the end, I feel that we need to take risks, just like any other product manufacturer. Our product may be a hit, or it may be a flop, but I'm not a fan of officially releasing lashups.