[chiph]

> "non functional product"

More accounting fun! This time around revenue recognition. It used to be that you had to ship a physical item to a customer in order to recognize the revenue from the sale. So the place I worked at back then would send out first-draft manuals to customers who had ordered the not-quite-done software. When we finished it and it passed testing, we'd send them the actual diskettes and an updated manual.

I never heard of any complaints being lodged, so it must have been a standard industry practice of the time. Or the salespeople had already smoothed the waves with the customers.