Vaporware

:This article refers to the term as used in computer industry. For the company, see VaporWare (company).

Varieties

In some cases, vaporware may be the result of a trial balloon which "doesn't fly". Subsequently the project is quietly cancelled, sometimes before any actual development work is done.

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In other cases, vaporware may be announced by companies in order to damage the development or marketability of more real products by competitors, sometimes in combination with a campaign of FUD; if the customer believes the hype, they may put off purchasing the real product to wait for its vaporous rival to mature.

Related Topics:
FUD - Hype

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Allegations of anticompetitive vaporware, as well as concerns within the software industry prompted David Dranove (of Northwestern University) and Neil Gandal (of Tel Aviv University, University of California, Berkeley) to conduct an empirical study designed to measure the effect of the DIVX preannouncement on the DVD market. This study suggests that the DIVX preannouncement slowed down the adoption of DVD technology. According to Dranove and Gandal, the study suggests that the ?general antitrust concern about vaporware seems justified.? http://repositories.cdlib.org/iber/cpc/CPC01-016/

Related Topics:
Northwestern University - Tel Aviv University - University of California, Berkeley - DIVX - DVD

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Many companies announce vapourware in order to prove that their R&D departments are still full of new ideas. The more ambitious the project, the better. One subtle variation of this strategy is to vapourise one particular much-touted feature of a forthcoming product. For example, the WinFS feature of Windows Vista generated a lot of enthusiasm, but will not make it into the release.

Related Topics:
WinFS - Windows Vista

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Sometimes vaporware is the result of over-optimism on the part of a well-intending organization, and may actually materialize after a long waiting time (sometimes years). One example of this was the long-delayed Apple Macintosh word processor FullWrite, announced by Ann Arbor Softworks in January 1987 for delivery that April, and actually delivered in April 1988. In the United Kingdom, Sir Clive Sinclair's Sinclair Research Ltd was quite notorious for its tardy product delivery cycle; various flat-screen displays, miniature televisions, the Sinclair QL business computer and Sinclair C5 electric car, the advanced Loki and several other projects were either late, unfinished, or entirely fictitious.

Related Topics:
Apple Macintosh - FullWrite - Ann Arbor Softworks - 1987 - 1988 - United Kingdom - Clive Sinclair - Sinclair Research Ltd - Sinclair QL - Sinclair C5 - Loki

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Sometimes the delays or eventual shelving of a software product may be caused by a corporate merger or internal strife within the company.

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Often vaporware that does materialize fails to live up to expectations. One example is the game Daikatana, which was announced in 1997 but did not ship until 2000. Many who had waited felt the gameplay was disappointingly uninteresting. Ultima IX, another example, 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 many common graphics cards.

Related Topics:
Daikatana - 1997 - 2000 - Ultima IX - 1994 - 1999

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In other cases, vaporware never materializes because some other product fills its niche in the meantime, rendering it redundant or unmarketable. One example is Project Xanadu, a hypertext project started in 1960 whose intended role has been mostly filled by the World Wide Web; or the GNU Hurd, the free software kernel whose place in the free software world has been (by and large) filled by Linux. (The Hurd may yet be completed, but its original intended role as part of a complete GPL Unix system has been fulfilled.)

Related Topics:
Project Xanadu - Hypertext - 1960 - World Wide Web - GNU Hurd - Free software - Linux - GPL

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In addition to historical examples, there are many products whose ultimate fate is unknown, but which as of 2004 are considered vaporware. One such example is the computer game Duke Nukem Forever, which has been in development for over 8 years. 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 perpetual vaporware status. Some games can become vaporware even if they are the subject of a promotional campaign. Such was the case of a game based upon the TV series Aeon Flux which was the subject of TV commercials both broadcast and included on home video releases of the series, but the game itself was never released.

Related Topics:
2004 - Computer game - Duke Nukem Forever - 2001 - 2002 - 2000 - 2003 - Aeon Flux

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Also worth noting are the Indrema and Phantom video game consoles. The latter took Wired's top "award" in 2004. Microsoft's Longhorn OS, announced for 2004 and now called Longwait by some, garnered third place. Wired noted that a supposedly key feature, the WinFS file system, has already been dropped from it, and quoting a reader as saying "If Microsoft keeps on pushing back the dates for Longhorn and removing features from it, they might as well just promise to bundle Duke Nukem Forever with the OS." As of 28 April 2005 Longhorn will no longer ship with trusted computing either. The Longhorn Project has recently however been renamed Windows Vista, and Microsoft is looking at a release date in the second quarter of 2006.

Related Topics:
Indrema - Phantom - 2004 - Microsoft - 28 April - 2005 - Trusted computing - Windows Vista

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