Vaporware

Vaporware is software or hardware that is preannounced by a developer, but never emerges as an actual product. The term implies deception; that is, it implies that the announcer knows that product development is in too early a stage to support responsible statements about its completion date, feature set, or even feasibility.

The word vaporware was popularized in the trade press circa 1984, perhaps in response to Ovation Technologies' OVATION, an integrated software package for DOS. OVATION was announced in 1983. Company management was widely lauded for their skill in securing venture financing, generating "buzz", and giving superb demonstrations showing a product that, had it existed, would have been greatly superior to Lotus Development Corporation's 1-2-3. Unfortunately, they neglected to arrange for development of an actual product.

CIO magazine^[1]credits Esther Dyson as having coined the word in 1984. Paul Andrews^[2], however, states that "Although 'vaporware' was perhaps popularized by Esther, she credits Ann Winblad, who in turn heard it from Microsoft's Mark Ursino...but Stewart Alsop (stewart_alsop@infoworld.com) may have been the one to turn it into everyday lingo with his P.C. Letter list."

In some cases, vaporware may be the result of a trial balloon. In other cases, vaporware is announced by companies in order to damage the development of real products by competitors; if the customer believes the hype, they may put off purchasing the real product to wait for its vaporous rival to mature.

Sometimes vaporware is the result of overoptimism on the part of an honest organization, and may actually materialize after a long waiting time (sometimes years). One example of this was the long-delayed Macintosh word processor FullWrite, announced by Ann Arbor Softworks in January 1987 for delivery in April, and actually delivered in late 1988.

Most of the time, when vaporware does materialize, it was not worth the wait. Daikatana was announced in 1997 but didn't ship until 2000. Poor graphics and a bad storyline disappointed many who had waited. Ultima IX was poor consolation for those who had waited since 1994, only to find the version released late in 1999 was very buggy and impossible to run on normal graphics cards.

In other cases vaporware never materializes because some other product fills its niche. Examples include Project Xanadu, a hypertext project started in 1960 whose intended role has been mostly filled by the World Wide Web, and the Hurd, a project started in 1984 to create a free software replacement for the Unix operating system, which has mostly been supplanted by the free Unix-like operating systems Linux and FreeBSD.

A notorious example of vaporware in the gaming world is Duke Nukem Forever, which, as of 2004, was six years past its release date. The game won Wired News' Vaporware Awards in 2001 and 2002, got second place in 2000 and in 2003 was given the Lifetime Achievement Award for its permanent vaporware status. Also worth noting is the Indrema and Phantom video game consoles.

'Vaporware' is also a company selling Amiga Internet applications [1].

See also:

• List of cancelled video games

References

[1] CIO article crediting Ester Dyson for the term

[1] Paul Andrews says Dyson credits Ann Winblad, and that Stewart Alsop popularized it

External links

• Wired News' 2003 Vaporware Awards (2002, 2001, 2000, 1999, 1998)
• Where Is Phantom?? - "The site for all Critics, Cynics, Detractors and Doubters", a site about the controversy over Infinium Labs's Phantom