Vaporware
[1] Network World magazine called vaporware an "epidemic" in 1989 and blamed the press for not investigating if developers' claims were true.
The United States accused several companies of announcing vaporware early enough to violate antitrust laws, but few have been found guilty.
"Vaporware" was coined by a Microsoft engineer in 1982 to describe the company's Xenix operating system and appeared in print at least as early as the May 1983 issue of Sinclair User magazine (spelled as 'Vapourware' in UK English).
InfoWorld magazine editor Stewart Alsop helped popularize it by lampooning Bill Gates with a Golden Vaporware award for the late release of his company's first version of Windows in 1985.
She asked two Microsoft software engineers, John Ulett and Mark Ursino, who confirmed that development of Xenix had stopped.
[3] Winblad described the word to influential computer expert Esther Dyson,[3] who published it for the first time in her monthly newsletter RELease 1.0.
In an article titled "Vaporware" in the November 1983 issue of RELease 1.0, Dyson defined the word as "good ideas incompletely implemented".
[8] When discussing Coleco's delay in releasing the Adam, Creative Computing in March 1984 stated that the company "did not invent the common practice of debuting products before they actually exist.
[9] After Dyson's article, the word "vaporware" became popular among writers in the personal computer software industry as a way to describe products they believed took too long to be released after their first announcement.
[6][13] The demonstration was well received by writers in the press, was featured in a cover story for an industry magazine, and reportedly created anticipation among potential customers.
The company created the fake demonstration in an unsuccessful attempt to raise money to finish their product,[12] and is "widely considered the mother of all vaporware," according to Laurie Flynn of The New York Times.
[14] Popular Science magazine uses a scale ranging from "vaporware" to "bet on it" to describe release dates of new consumer electronics.
[11] Large organizations seem to have more late projects than smaller ones, and may benefit from hiring individual programmers on contract to write software rather than using in-house development teams.
[13] As the word became more commonly used by writers in the mid-1980s, InfoWorld magazine editor James Fawcette wrote that its negative connotations were unfair to developers because of these types of circumstances.
[20] The company's previous game released in 1996, Duke Nukem 3D, was a critical and financial success, and customer anticipation for its sequel was high.
As personal computer hardware speeds improved at a rapid pace in the late 1990s, it created an "arms race" between companies in the video game industry, according to Wired News.
By the time 3D Realms went out of business in 2009 with the game still unreleased, Duke Nukem Forever had become synonymous with the word "vaporware" among industry writers.
The firm created an advertising campaign—including brochures and a shopping-mall appearance—around a large ambiguous box covered in brown paper to increase curiosity until Sente could be announced.
[3] Early announcements send signals not only to customers and the media, but also to providers of support products, regulatory agencies, financial analysts, investors, and other parties.
[25] When IBM announced its Professional Workstation computer in 1986, they noted the lack of third-party programs written for it at the time, signaling those developers to start preparing.
In his 1989 Network World article, Joe Mohen wrote the practice had become a "vaporware epidemic", and blamed the press for not investigating claims by developers.
[32] In the United States, announcing a product that does not exist to gain a competitive advantage is illegal via Section 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, but few hardware or software developers have been found guilty of it.
[33] False or misleading announcements designed to influence stock prices are illegal under United States securities fraud laws.
[41] US District Judge Stanley Sporkin was a vocal opponent of the practice during his review of the settlement resulting from United States v. Microsoft Corp. in 1994.
