The problem with spin, both positive and negative, is that once you start selecting your facts and putting them in a light that supports your position, you open things up to people selecting facts without any connection to the truth. This is especially common in what bean-counters term "forward-looking statements" -- as soon as you predict what people or software will do, the door is wide open for any person with an opinion to set it forth; and once that happens, the prediction that wins is often not the one with the best support from verifiable facts, but the one with the best spin. Alas, you need to predict what people or software are going to do in order to plan for the next week, the next quarter, or the next year, and there is no shortage of bad spin.

I've been in Phil's position before, but without a Rand to support me. Phil's argument worked not because he had good spin, but because the people who were listening recognized the facts beneath the spin -- in particular, that they were factual statements about the status and ability of the system.

My interaction went something like this --

Me: See this graph? Down here across this axis we have the number of simulated users. Up here along this axis we have the server response time. Notice that when we hit about 55 users, the server response time gets silly, and when we hit about 75 users, the server stops responding completely because requests start timing out.

Manager: But we have 400-odd users, and we expect more than half of them to be online at any given time during business hours.

Me: Exactly.

--- Later ---

Manager: Our tests suggest that the server will stop responding at about 75 simultaneous users. We should....

Director-level Spinmeister: That's not a problem! We'll roll the application out slowly, so not everyone starts using it at once! That will give us time to tune the performance!

Me: But when the application is rolled out, people will use it more than they otherwise would because it's novel, and as soon as we hit 75 users, splat! Besides, we aren't doing any sort of access limitation, and once you tell one user about it, they'll spread the word -- we can't control this rollout.

Spinmeister: Don't be an alarmist! Everything will go wonderfully! I have faith in our crack engineering team!

(It didn't. Spin, meet facts. The numbers I predicted weren't spot on -- they didn't take network latency and bandwidth into account, which meant that we actually got up to 80 remote users before the thing fell over. But then my numbers didn't take into account 81 people obsessively clicking "refresh" when the server didn't respond to them quickly enough either....)