Vaporware

I just read the wikipedia article on Vaporware, and tracked down a few of its references.  Interestingly, the inventor of the term is purported to be an engineer for Microsoft Xenix in 1982.  There are only about 8 people which that title describes and I'm one of them.   The ultimate reference is this 1995 article in the New York Times, which describes a 1982 meeting Ann Winblad had with Mark Ursino and John Ulett.  I knew Ursino and Ulett quite well and I think I know what the meeting was about, although I wasn't there.  First of all, they're what we called in those days "Marketeers", which was a job that included sales, marketing and what later came to be called "program management".  They have some technical understanding, but they were not engineers.  For a purely OEM product like Xenix, their job mostly consisted of talking to folks--media like Winblad¹, Dyson, etc., potential customers, existing customers, etc., and ultimately the engineers themselves.  If I understand the context, what U&U were trying to say with the vaporware comment was that while we intended to do what we'd promised, but there was not an engineer actually working on it at that particular moment.   After all, there were only 8 of us and hundreds of promises made.  We did eventually stop working on Xenix, but it was not until 1987.  We earnestly did try to do everything we'd committed to.  We did a lot--Xenix for 8086, z8000, 68000, 286, 386, and in most cases, several wildly divergent platforms for each, and several versions of Xenix.  The specific thing I'm guessing Winblad was concerned about, the ability to make an atomic database operation in the face of file system caching and several processes having the file open simultaneously, was done in early '83, about a year after the relevant meeting.  It wasn't terribly hard, but it took more than a week.

In the 1960s and '70s, IBM made a determined effort to capture the entire computer market.  They came quite close to pulling it off.  One of the many dirty tricks they would play was to announce and attempt to sell a bunch of products that somebody thought might be useful, and see which ones had the most buyers.  Once they found out, they'd set about implementing those few, not bothering to implement the majority of the proposed products.  A smaller company wouldn't have the working capital to pull this off.  A customer considering choosing a competitor can easily be reigned in, for the cost of some hype.   Eventually, this, and many other of IBMs monopolist stunts, would be banned, but not before most of their competitors had failed.  This strategy is now known as "selling vaporware". 

It seems to me there are three legitimate things which might be called vaporware:

1. We're working on it, but it'll take some time before it's ready.
2. We intend to work on it, but it'll be a while before we can even free up enough time to start.
3. We don't really intend to work on it unless we get enough customer demand.

As long as the customer knows which is in play, they may be frustrating, but resources are finite and decisions must be made.   There's a fourth thing, which is not so legitimate:

     4.  We don't intend to do this, but we're pretending we are, to inhibit you from going with our competitor.

In other words, lying to the customer.   Unfortunately, too many people on the marketing side think this is ok.  If you change jobs every year or two and never have to face the consequences of being caught in a lie, this may be ok for you.  But it undermines the future of the organization that appears to have done it.


¹ Winblad was at the time still with a company doing accounting software, Open Systems, Inc, but her real importance was the articles she was writing.