Vaporware - the Tech That Never Was 192
An anonymous reader writes "CNet has published an incredibly detailed look at the most critical examples of vaporware ever seen in the tech sector. We're familiar with Wired's yearly round-ups, but this decades-long retrospective look at the most promising of all technologies that never saw the light of day, holds some fascinating technology I've never even heard of, including the wonderfully-named three-dimensional atomic holographic optical data storage nanotechnology. 'Continual delays, setbacks and excuses are the calling cards of a product that becomes vapourware. Windows Vista ran the risk of joining the club, and the terrific multiplayer first-person shooter Team Fortress 2 was in production for almost a decade before it was released in 2007. Devoted TF fans feared it would become a distinguished entrant in the who's who of vapourware. You might say Google Mail is in the running, having been in beta since 2004.'"
Google Mail (Score:4, Interesting)
Next Photo (Score:5, Interesting)
Vaporware as a strategy (Score:5, Interesting)
It's a good strategy. Tell a lie to scare everyone else off. Take your sweet time producing an app into a competition free market.
Re:Oh, come on. GMail? (Score:3, Interesting)
I think it has been in "beta" so long, that if it were ever announced to be "released", people would expect something new and whizzy, which completely destroys the point of distinguishing "beta software" from "release software". However its questionable whether these categories have much value any longer.
The reason the beta doesn't come off is that there isn't any such thing as released software anymore. In the early days, the beta label warned people that gmail might not work with their browser; these that warning is as close to superfluous as it will ever be. What has changed since the "beta/release" terminology was introduced into the common language is the discrediting of the waterfall project management model -- not that people are any better at project management than they used to be. Using agile methods, you're continually do small releases, so you never have a final "released" product.
Re:Old vaporware (Score:3, Interesting)
The thing people miss on supply and demand is that demand isn't any more a constant than supply. As the supply shrinks, price soars, and demand drops. People find alternatives...They drive less, carpool more. In the 80's everyone dumped their gas guzzing american cars for more fuel efficient imports. The decrease in demand drove the price back down.
Then in the 90's along comes the SUV craze, so everyone goes back to buying gas guzzlers. Now we're back in the same boat. Eventually the supply will start constricting on the other end (e.g. "Peak Oil") and alternative fuels will become more popular. The increased demand there will push an increase in suppliers, increasing the supply and driving down the price.
Historically, you never see a price go up forever. Either the resource is finite, or the cost drives the adoption of alternatives, which become popular enough to pull demand away from the original resource.
Re:Google Mail (Score:3, Interesting)
the former froogle, now renamed google products [google.com]), predates it by a year or so. I believe froogle entered beta around Christmas 2002 or 2003. Some google labs [google.com] stuff (non-beta testing and ideas area) is even older.
Re:Small point... (Score:0, Interesting)
Re:Google Mail (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Old vaporware (Score:2, Interesting)
Indeed. For more on the subject (and a pic of those cool giant trucks) see this Wired article [wired.com].
Re:Political Vapourware (Score:3, Interesting)
This goes way, way back. IBM, ever the hardball player in the mainframe arena, announced the System 360 and OS/360 before it was even on the drawing boards, as a same-week response to CDC's announcement of one of the Cray-designed CDC 6000 series computers. IBM didn't deliver until well over a year after announcement. Practices such as these helped precipitate the decade of litigation known as "IBM vs the BUNCH (Burroughs, Univac, NCR, CDC and Honeywell)" although it was the BUNCH who went after IBM for monopolistic practices.
The endless chain of litigation (which made the SCO/Unix litigation look like a lawn mower dispute) was finally finished when two tapes that contained the index to whole warehouses of source documents (punch cards, mostly) were "accidentally" scrubbed.
Hmm... Lenovo. Wasn't that an IBM spinoff?