Wired’s Vaporware Top Ten
p2pnet.net News:- “Year after year after year, tech companies promise spectacular products that twinkle and shine in demos and press releases, but slowly begin to fade and dim as the promised release dates near,” says Wired News. “Welcome to the shadowy, spectral world of vaporware, a product purgatory where goods are promised, but not delivered.”
Shadowy indeed ; p With that in mind, every year for the past eight years Wired News has published its now [in]famous Vaporware Awards list and 2004, ” was a very good year for vaporware. A vintage year, indeed.”
In the Top Spot for 2004 was Infinium Labs’ Phantom games-on-demand console, last year’s No. 3. “By the time this thing ever comes out, we’ll have solved the chicken-and-the-egg question, colonized galaxies, cured disease and famine and, most importantly – moved on,” said Matthew Szymczyk.
Even more to the point, “The Phantom is a scam,” wrote Wired reader Derek Chatwood. ” It will never be anything more than maybe a couple of old Dells shoved inside repainted Xbox cases to fool some gullible press or second-round investors.
The Number Two position went to CherryOS, a Mac emulator for Windows PCs from a, “hitherto-unknown Hawaiian company, Maui X-Stream, rocked the tech world with news of CherryOS, a Mac emulator for Windows PCs that supposedly ran wicked fast and cost only $50. The software was offered as a download, but the stampeding hordes of closet Apple lovers at Slashdot crashed the servers before anyone could get it.”
Tony Lunde thought, “We will probably see a cure for death before we see a true platform emulator.” But, “It’s still a pretty interesting idea, though.”
And Number Three was, Yes, Microsoft’s Longhorn.
Bill Restemeyer said “Longwait” might be a better name, and Steve Story wrote, “WinFS has been vaporware for over a decade, and recently a delay of many more years was announced. (2008 has been bandied about.) Somewhere, Microsoft programmers are spending their entire careers on a single piece of vaporware.”
Apple got a dishonourable mention as well. It was listed as #8.
“In June 2003, Apple CEO Steve Jobs said IBM’s G5 chips would be at 3 GHz within 12 months,” wrote Wired. “It’s been 18.”
See the full, ignominious run-down at Wired News.
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See:-
open source – Vaporware Phantom Haunts Us All, Wired News, January 6, 2005
