The difference that you're missing is where the ad happened.
It happened on Usenet, before most people had heard of Usenet, naming technologies that were brand spanking new. How new? The most popular browser was Mosaic. Netscape was barely founded and had not released a browser yet. http://oreilly.com/gnn/ was the first commercial website and was under 1 year old.
That shows a lot of knowledge of the tech world of the day. "Overreaching startup founders" weren't yet a significant concern. The target audience would realize quickly that this was risky, but unlikely to be a BS ad.
> It happened on Usenet, before most people had heard of Usenet,
Wait what? Usenet had been established for many years by 1994, and many people were using it. You could access it via several online providers and their Internet gateways. (Here's the first message from an AOL account: (https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!msg/comp.dcom....) )
That should say, "before most people were even aware of the internet, and who would go on to use the internet having never even known that Usenet existed." Back in '94, I think that most internet users used Usenet to some extent, but certainly "most people" in the world had never heard of Usenet, and never would, and still haven't.
It happened on Usenet, before most people had heard of Usenet, naming technologies that were brand spanking new. How new? The most popular browser was Mosaic. Netscape was barely founded and had not released a browser yet. http://oreilly.com/gnn/ was the first commercial website and was under 1 year old.
That shows a lot of knowledge of the tech world of the day. "Overreaching startup founders" weren't yet a significant concern. The target audience would realize quickly that this was risky, but unlikely to be a BS ad.