I don't dislike marketing that hides the details because it hurts my ego. I dislike it because I assume I am being scammed. Details are evidence of honesty, both in marketing and in real life, because every detail is a chance for somebody to slip up and expose their lies. If they're telling the truth, why hide the details?
I understand your skepticism when details are hidden, but there can be some valid reasons:
* details are so technical that they're hard to explain without "just look at the code type explanations". I've run into this roadblock trying to explain the Spark Catalyst optimizer.
* Not truly understanding all the details, so you can't explain the tech. Sometimes the documentation writer can't provide a "plain English" overview of the technology.
* the details are the proprietary IP / secret sauce of the company
The inner workings of a proprietary query engine are a good example of all three. It may be great tech, but hard to explain and part of it are the secret sauce that they don't want to expose. Not exposing something doesn't necessarily mean they're hiding something / being dishonest.
> details are so technical that they're hard to explain without "just look at the code type explanations".
> Sometimes the documentation writer can't provide a "plain English" overview of the technology.
So lead your marketing material with the code and explanations or tutorials, or whatever. (But I'm repeating the article now...)
> the details are the proprietary IP / secret sauce of the company
This one isn't reasonable. It's the detail of how to use and how it can be used that are important, not how it works. If you can't tell those, how do people use your product? Do you make your customers sign an NDA before they buy it? (Yeah, some products do require an NDA before you buy them, you can expect those ones to be very hard to sell.)
