In the good old days enterprise software vendors could sell vaporware. In the good old days you could throw enough money at a deficient product or service and you could actually sustain sales growth. Dissatisfied people could be contained in isolated pockets and companies staged carefully rehearsed case studies and testimonials. You could lie effectively.
This is no longer possible. Today if you try to sell a deficient product or service, the prospective customer will find a negative review buried deep in an obscure blog, written by someone who experienced your product pain, firsthand. A couple more of these public comments and you are toast.
The Internet has made the cost of lying unbearable. If your company has a bad DNA, i.e., you lie to your employees, screw your suppliers, mistreat your customers or you simply don't care, that underlying corporate culture will surface in the web slowly but surely. You cannot contain the bad episodes that will pop out of your deficient culture.
So the only way to be on the Internet for the long haul is to be honest and open. Remove the marketing bulls**t from your site and say it like it is. Don't oversell. And don't hide stuff. Or lie. People will get disappointed. And disappointed people create bad rep.
Finally a world where you can be honest and come up at the top. And not feel dumb about it.
Besides my daily job as CEO of 
It's an interesting point that I think will cause quite emotional reactions from many of us who have been in the SW industry for a while :)
I remember a couple of years ago a friend telling me he'd started a new software company with honesty as one of its core tenets - honesty with their customers, prospects, partners and employees. It wasn't just talk - and became a self-policing and liberating for the team (e.g. what features to market as being part of the upcoming release...how about the ones that are in it and work!) Incidentally, they've become incredibly successful!
Thanks for sharing this story. And you are absolutely right. A lot of companies are realizing with surprise that they cannot pretend to be honest. The changes need to be done at the company core values.
Saying that "... will surface in the web slowly but surely" is an understatement. In today's world, it will surface extremely quickly and sometimes catch you by surprise.
In a recent example, a company (I don't remember which one it was - but I guess that's quite irrelevant for this example) had prepared a massive advertising campaign, spending millions of $$ on ads running on National television.
An angry Mom twitted about the campaign, and (unknowingly) rallied a growing number of other moms... in a matter of days, the company had to call off the campaign.
The keyword here is days. The web is fast, and when the s**t hits the fan, the devastation can be comparable to that of a hurricane.