Product or feature doesn't make it out of testing because is doesn't work?

Don't blame the development team for writing code that doesn't work.

Don't blame the 'engineering' team for failing to meet a committment.

No, instead, tell the customer that the feature is no longer needed -

Microsoft announced its decision to discontinue development of one of the core features of Windows Home Server, a technology called Drive Extender.

And ... here's the rub -

"The reason they are outraged is because everyone knows the real reason why this feature was dropped. The Drive Extender architecture had a troubled past involving a particularly nasty data-destroying bug that was finally fixed in late 2008. For the next release of Windows Home Server, someone made the engineering decision to completely redesign the Drive Extender code base. I’ll let Peter Bright explain what happened next:

With Vail, Drive Extender was completely rewritten in a manner that should make it both more flexible and more reliable. Instead of using regular NTFS disks, Vail inserts a layer underneath the filesystem. This layer was responsible for distributing blocks of data between disks, replicating them to ensure fault tolerance, and de-duplicating them to make the system more efficient…

Unfortunately, the new block layer in Vail doesn’t quite work right. Just like Drive Extender in Windows Home Server, there have been bugs. Different bugs, but bugs all the same. Microsoft hasn’t gone into explicit detail about what these problems are, but there were some issues with its ability to correct errors, and some Small Business Server testers reported application compatibility problems.

So instead of fixing the flaws, and potentially delaying the three products dependent on Drive Extender, Microsoft is killing the feature altogether.

Everyone in the Windows Home Server community knows this is absolutely true. And yet Leworthy did not mention a word of those bugs and engineering issues in his bland and incomplete blog posts. Let’s call it a lie of omission, because that’s what it is."


Read the article for the rest. It's one thing to admit something doesn't work. It's another to lie about it to customers you've previously committed to that something will be there.
 
I have a similar issue in my own life. I refuse to do business with Amazon because they are all a bunch of right-wingers, and they believe in censorship. But the Mrs. ordered something recently from them. Their delivery vendor had been saying up till yesterday that the order would arrive ... yesterday.
 
Well it didn't. And now, the vendor says it's arriving at a later date.
 
I understand things happen. I understand that often times, these things happen beyond one's control.
 
But don't lie about it. Don't lie to a paying customer.
 
Why can't businesses understand this?