This is true -- and it happens everyday within big corporations.

I was doing the multimedia for internal training material pertaining to new products and services for the company I used to work at. Sometimes new P&S were coming down the line and even we -- who should have been educating our sales associates about such new things -- were not given access to information that would have been very useful in stores. Sometimes the first time we'd get to see a new product in order to shoot photos or video of it for the training material would be when we went into a store when the product launched and shot it in the store. No kidding.

Needless to say, the salespeople knew less than we did at this point.

On a related note, what do you think Apple sales reps told people about the iPhone if they got calls about it pre-launch. Probably that they didn't even know what it was. As a matter of fact, many of my friends who work at Apple stores denied the iPhone even days before it was announced.

Tim