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.

Pre-Blibbet

From my collection, before we used email for phone messages or had the blibbet logo.  1981, I think.  The paper and glue are starting to get a little brittle.

Unicycle Jousting

The recent Washington State Lottery ad showing jousting on Segways reminded me of this, which I wrote in the early 90s in response to a picture in a Microsoft recruiting brochure, which was of me unicycle jousting.  The article's original home unicycling.org has gone away, so I thought I should re-post it here:

The two guys in the picture are rick raddatz (in the white helmet) and brian lewis (in the green helmet). it was taken on the Microsoft redmond campus about 1989 or so.

brian invented this lunacy when he was at oregon state univ. in the mid 70s. the lance is an 8 foot wooden dowel...the sort of thing that's normally used to hang clothes on. it has a tennis ball on the end, with silicone caulk on it. we discovered that the lance tends to skitter wildly on the shield, which is both dangerous and makes it difficult to get a good hit. the caulk minimizes this: it makes the lance tip stick to the shield long enough to get a decent hit.

the shield is about 30 inches in diameter, made of 3/4 inch plywood, and has a sturdy horizontal brace (also 3/4 ply) along where your forearm goes. there's a handle on this brace near one edge, and along the center is a leather sleeve for your left forearm.


we've found that it's important to wear a glove that comes well up your right arm: brian got his skin pinched between the lance and the shield, requiring stitches. we also decided that we needed to establish some rules: the blow must come from the tip of the lance, and must be aimed at the center of the shield, favoring "low and inside" so that any deflections will go between the riders and not across them, and will not ride up, where it might hit the rider in the face or throat. the riders must attempt to pass to the right...that is, the way americans and mainland europeans drive, not like brittons, japanese, and australians. the shield must be held perpendicular to the blow.

if you follow reasonable safety precautions, it's really not at all dangerous, and it looks really silly (which is a good thing...). since you pretty much have to knock the other rider off by playing with the timing and force of the blow (as opposed to the aim), and you're on a not especially stable mount in the first place, you really can't hurt the other guy. as a matter of fact, I think more falls come from the rider holding the lance that made the good hit than the shield that was hit.



There's a video clip of Brian and me jousting on national TV in Frank Gibney's "The Pacific Century".   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEl5nhtGRJA&feature.  go to 2:17