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As a former (recovering) vendor, I want to point out that there's no such thing as the "vendor". Instead, it's individuals at the vendor who lie. Part of this is due to ignorance, as the person answering the question often doesn't know the answer.
2/ Companies as a whole don't really want to lie. In the long run, they win because of happy customers and repeat business. Sales people have enormous incentives to lie, because their compensation in the short term depends upon closing the deal.
3/ Sales people don't knowing "lie", they just have a poor relationship with the truth. For example, if customer asks "do you do X?", the sales person relays the question to technical people, and keeps asking another technical person until the answer is "yes".
4/ So they tell the customer "yes" even though 9 other technical people in the corporation said "no". And remember, "technical" doesn't mean the "authoritative expert", just "slightly more technical than the sales person".
5/ I was the authoritative expert for pretty much every vendor I ever worked for. It's from that perspective that I watched information filter through marketing/support/sales to the customer.
6/ There's no excusing vendor lies, but at the same time, I'm not sure they are worse than the lies customers tell themselves. We are working in an environment where the buyers have given up on any semblance of critical thinking.
7/ My first IPS ran on WinNT on x86. Everyone knew that Unix on RISC (like Solaris on SPARC) would be faster. It wasn't. Solaris networking was crap that would drop packets even at very slow packet rates. But it was nearly impossible to compete against what "everyone knows".
8/ Nowadays, ring-mode drivers (like PF_RING or DPDK) are well understood. Back then, it was a novelty, and it was impossible to communicate how it worked to customers.
9/ 20 years later and I'm still bitter about what "everyone knows".
