Wired: Vaporware 2009 Announced

"Vaporware 2009: Inhale the Fail"
Epicenter, Wired (December 21, 2009)

"Take a deep breath and savor the sweet stench of disappointment. It's time for another installment of Wired.com's Vaporware Awards.

"This is the 12th year we've offered our annual roundup of the tech industry's biggest, brashest and most baffling unfulfilled promises. As in years past, we turned to you, our readers, to offer suggestions on what we should include. A few weeks ago, we posted the rules: No rumors, it had to have been promised for this year, and anything that ended up delayed, derailed or otherwise absent was fair game. You e-mailed, you commented, you tweeted.

"There's one particular gaping hole this year. We decided to give a pass to our long-reigning champ, Duke Nukem Forever. We know, it just isn't the same without Sir Duke, but it wouldn't have been fair to include him, either. Game company 3-D Realms imploded this summer, and...."

You may not agree with the items on the list - or the order of their ranking. However, all 10 are promised-in-2009: and, unless something happens in the next ten days (counting today), they're no-shows.

I tend to think of vaporware as software that a company extols - and doesn't deliver. Apparently, hardware can be vaporware, too. Like Pixel Qi's display; and the D-Link Xtreme N450 with it's incredible - and, to date, unavailable, 450 Mbps throughput.

I'm not sure what to think of this sort of article. They're fun to read, in a way. But I think of the developers: the clueless managers or supervisors who demand a report on how many pixels there are in an inch; programmers who take a weekend off, and return a month later; and all the other SNAFUs that can derail the best-planned development schedule.