Wired Releases Annual Vaporware List

alacqua writes: "Wired has an article titled Vaporware 2001: Empty Promises which is a top-ten list of last year's vaporware. 'You've Got Smell!' made it, but the Justice Department did not. Says Wired, 'Speaking of Microsoft, some smart-aleck readers opined that the most vaporous thing in tech last year was the Justice Department's failure to deliver on its promise to punish Bill Gates for his company's monopolistic misdeeds -- but we thought that a bit of a stretch.'"

Comments

Warcraft 3?

[Cheetah86]

How did warcraft 3 make the list of vaporware? It's coming out soon, the beta is tonight... Just because something is delayed doesn't make it vaporware.

Re:Warcraft 3?

[_UnderTow_]

I agree, I'm pretty tired of people crying when blizzard pushes back the release dates of their games. Everything they have put out from Warcraft 1 to Diablo 2 has been a solid, well polished game.

Blizzard's overall attention to detail is WAY above the average for the video game industry. 3D Realms and Valve completely deserve their spots on this list however.

Re:Vapourware? Thank God!

[dbretton]

Wow! Wayyy OT.

Ask any Economics 101 student and he will tell you that a free, open service market will eventually become closed, and the barriers to entry then raised insurmountably high. At this point, you need the government to step in and free up the market.

If I run a steel corporation and corner the steel market, what do I do next? In order to have my company continue to flourish, it must need to grow. If I have closed out a market, I need to expand to other markets....like utilizing that steel...
My next move would be to get involved in steel construction...then automotive and shipbuilding, each time utilizing my corporation's vastly deep pockets to outperform my competitors in my new market....

Re:Vapourware? Thank God!

[Violet Null]

Government has no business interfering with the market!

Yep. I dream of the day when food products no longer need to have those annoyingly informative nutritional labels upon them. I yearn for when we can break free of the schackles imposed upon us by "truth in advertising". I'll lead the parade when we get rid of "safety standards". I'll...

Oh, wait. You're a troll. Nevermind.

You can't have it both ways

[mESSDan]

3 items the article mentioned were games that have been in development for quite a while. Why is a 4 year development cycle a problem? What is wrong with "When it's done"?

I for one am glad that the software developers (3D Realms for Duke Nukem Forever in particular) are taking their time creating this game. I am sick and tired of games being released these days that need patch after patch, often times just to make the game PLAYABLE, let alone enjoyable.

Where and when should developers draw the line? Shouldn't that be for them to decide?

Re:You can't have it both ways

[jafac]

If you choose to believe that a 4 year development cycle is going to eliminate all bugs, and yield perfect software - then goody for you. But you're wrong.

The problem here isn't even a long development cycle. The problem is - you obviously have a situation here where the company's MARKETING department is running the show. They announce their product WAY before it's done, because they feel they need to win the pissing contest with their competitors.
The whole problem here is one of credibility. Nobody calls these people on their "innacurate statements" (also known as "lies" in some circles). So the market (particularly the analysts and press) is actually partly to blame for this situation. Then, when Marketing has overpromised, and created a level of expectation that is simply not grounded in reality, Engineering is forced to cram in coding and testing to meet Marketing's outrageous goals. In most cases, this leads to a buggy piece of crap - no matter how many years it spends in development.

The cause of vaporware is in the marketing department, not the engineering department. The cause of buggy software is usually an engineering team that has been stretched too thin, or pulled in too many different directions - by a management team that can't or won't stand up to the political forces of the marketing department.

This isn't limited to games, by the way, either. It's 99% of the software industry. Open your eyes.

Empty promises

[Burgundy Advocate]

How about a linux distribution that actually works, yet is easy to set up (ie: no kernel recompile, no scrambling for more libs). Maybe even decent laptop support, and OpenGL support out of the box.

Something like Redhat (though better) with more of a Slackware approach to how it works.

I've been hearing about this one for years. If it would some day arrive, it'd be very nice. Until then, Windows XP it is. I don't have the time to fuck with linux for hours.

The Vapor List Problems...

[Thomas M Hughes]

Aside from promises made aproximately 40 years ago (and every decade since then), I don't know of anyone who honestly expected AI to arrive in 2001, especially no one who knew anything about it in 2001, or in 2000, or 1999, etc. Claiming its vaporware was a bit off. No one is marketing HAL to the masses everyday, like the other things on the list.

Secondly, Blizzard has always been late with their games. Usually several years late. In fact, I submitted a story (that actually got accepted) to Slashdot a few months ago saying that Warcraft3 wouldn't be out until 2002. Blizzard is almost always the first to say "Calm down, its not ready yet" as opposed to other items on the list that we were always being told "Expect to get this real soon!"

I always felt Vapor involved products that we were falsely told to expect soon. Both AI and Warcraft3 were things that we should have known weren't coming anytime soon. Thinking otherwise is a result of being ill informed.

Re:FPS are, by definition, cookie-cutter

[Erasmus Darwin]

"If it's another FPS, how can it NOT be cookie-cutter ?"

Half-Life was an FPS that managed to avoid being cookie-cutter, through the inclusion of plot and scripting. Most FPSes at the time consisted of "You're on a strange world. Go fight.", while Half-Life had a more immersive feel to it. The technology behind it may have been nothing revolutionary, but the overall effect was anything but cookie-cutter.

Thief redefined the term FPS to mean "first person sneaker". It's technically the same sort of game as Quake or Doom, but a few tweaks to the rules of the world result in entirely different gameplay.

Just because most FPS games have been content to go with very straight-forward games, there're significant changes that can be made to avoid being cookie-cutter.

Vaporware?

[dillon_rinker]

Wired doesn't get it: software development is HARD. I can't really blame them, though, when so-called software developers don't get it. How hard can it be, I say, when I myself have developed several Visual Basic applications? Naturally this doesn't distinguish between doing it and doing it RIGHT. There is the problem of defining requirements; they generally turn out to conflict; then they change every other week. I'll say it again: developing commercial software for general release is HARD. And for the terminally inattentive, I'll spell out the rule of software release:

It is released when it is released. Don't expect it any sooner.

Anyway, here's Wired's (software) Vaporware for the last three years. Consider this year's in light of it...

Vaporware 1998: Windows 2000
It's here now.

Vaporware 1999
9. Ideaworks3d's Vecta3D
It's here now.
7. Games for the Mac
Not a Mac afficionado; all I know is that there are Mac games, but not many. I'll give them this one.
6. SDMI
It's here now, though flawed in both concept and execution...
5. Daikatana
It's here now.
4. Diablo II
It's here now.
3. Netscape's Communicator 5.0
It's here now (though they secretly incremented the version number while no one was looking).
1. Windows 2000
See 1998's list, above

Vaporware 2000
10: Tribes 2
It's here now.
6: Warcraft III
Hey, they finally nailed one!
4: A New Linux kernel (2.4, specifically)
It's here now.
3: Black and White
It's here now.
2: Duke Nukem Forever
This one's not here, but the article itself states there's no scheduled release date! How is this vaporware?
1: Mac OS X
It's here now.

So, Wired, in the software category, you called 2 out of 14 (both of which are still under active development). The rest weren't vapor. How, then, should we view this year's software entries?

Re:Vaporware?

[dimator]

Ya, software development is hard. Someone tell the damn marketing department at 3D Realms that, because I remember seeing magazine ads for Duke Nukem Forever (wired's #1 vaporware), when according to the CEO, they havent even begun to think about a release date, four years after the game was announced! How can it possibly live up to the expectations it has amassed?

My take on the Vaporware awards is this: they're not so much making fun of late software (because as you said, it is hard to do) but they're making fun of companies that stand on the highest peak, releasing one press release after another, shoutting out how earth-shattering their product is going to be, while not having anything remotely complete to ship.

You don't see, for example, iD doing that. "When it's done" has always been their release date, and they don't go nuts bragging about the next game years before hand.

Re:Slashdot moving to PNG from Gif

[Anonymous Coward]

How 'bout:

Slashdot: Boycott the MPAA. Buy the Lord of the Rings DVD.

My vote for vaporware of the year....

[soundsop]

...goes to GNOME's lack of anti-aliased fonts.

AA fonts may not have been promised by any developers but how can we live in the year 2002 without anti-aliased fonts on our desktop? Sometimes I find a quiet, isolated spot and just sob quietly thinking about it.

I know there's the gdkxft project, but let's get it into standard distributions soon.

Strange irony

[xX_sticky_Xx]

I find it funny that Warcraft 3 made the list on the same day that beta test signups for WC3 are being accepted. Mind you, the site seems to be completely down at the moment.