A beautiful demo beats a working prototype, at least as far as management is concerned.
I've actually seen this at work, where I managed to hack together a working (but ugly) system only to experience a lot of push-back. Once I polished the output, the same idea was welcomed.
Oddly enough, I learned this lesson back in college. In one engineering design class, I got an A on an assignment that looked really cool, but didn't actually work. I didn't hide the brokenness at all: I clearly documented the fact that it produced utterly nonsensical results in my report and discussed how I would have fixed the problem.
In retrospect, I've decided that they were teaching me an important lesson, but I'm still not quite sure if it was intentional or not.
I've actually seen this at work, where I managed to hack together a working (but ugly) system only to experience a lot of push-back. Once I polished the output, the same idea was welcomed.
Oddly enough, I learned this lesson back in college. In one engineering design class, I got an A on an assignment that looked really cool, but didn't actually work. I didn't hide the brokenness at all: I clearly documented the fact that it produced utterly nonsensical results in my report and discussed how I would have fixed the problem.
In retrospect, I've decided that they were teaching me an important lesson, but I'm still not quite sure if it was intentional or not.