Vaporware - the Tech That Never Was

An anonymous reader writes "CNet has published an incredibly detailed look at the most critical examples of vaporware ever seen in the tech sector. We're familiar with Wired's yearly round-ups, but this decades-long retrospective look at the most promising of all technologies that never saw the light of day, holds some fascinating technology I've never even heard of, including the wonderfully-named three-dimensional atomic holographic optical data storage nanotechnology. 'Continual delays, setbacks and excuses are the calling cards of a product that becomes vapourware. Windows Vista ran the risk of joining the club, and the terrific multiplayer first-person shooter Team Fortress 2 was in production for almost a decade before it was released in 2007. Devoted TF fans feared it would become a distinguished entrant in the who's who of vapourware. You might say Google Mail is in the running, having been in beta since 2004.'"

Comments

Old vaporware

[russotto]

1) Commercial fusion power production
2) Practical flying car
3) Oil from shale and other low grade sources (promised to be viable at $40-$50/bbl)
4) Household robots (or robot overlords, take your pick)
5) Cure for common cold

Re:Old vaporware

[Anonymous Coward]

Oil sands in Canada has been in production for a while.

Suncor has been making money at it for some time.

Re:Old vaporware

[maxume]

3, 4 and 5 are doing OK.

Oil Sands:

http://www.energy.gov.ab.ca/OurBusiness/oilsands.asp

(not a huge amount of output, but it has every appearance of being 'viable', it just isn't productive enough to satisfy demand so much that prices actually drop)

Roomba is a hit.

There are vaccines for the common cold. They aren't perfect, but they are either well marketed enough or effective enough that millions of people get them. If it's the marketing, they are vaporware, if they work, they aren't.

Re:Old vaporware

[Anonymous Coward]

But the oil cartels don't play with supply and demand. They have the entire supply, and can do what they want with it. While it still profits them, they will keep oil prices high. And, who's to say that the gasoline produced from oil is the only thing keeping prices high? What about the rising demand for power in China, or other developing nations, or even in the US? I'm no expert on these things (thus the AC posting), but cars are not the only thing driving the oil prices high.

Although, come to think of it, the price of raw oil isn't the only thing causing high gas prices; there are numerous taxes (should be listed on the pumps, at least in the States) added. They are there because the city, county, state, and federal governments know we have to get to work and most of us drive, so it's easy money for them.

I do have to agree with you on the finite resource/Peak Oil issue, but are we not still a number of years away from that? I feel that, until then, oil prices will remain high.

Re:Old vaporware

[kesuki]

number 3 is being beaten out by 'tar sand' production see, shale oil, isn't oil at all(it's kerogen), while most tar sands ARE oil. Heavy crude oil, still costly to process, so much so that they burn their own tar sand to produce the electricity (and steam) to refine the tar sand into oil, synthetic oil, or petroleum products. but Canada and Venezuela are the two largest tar sand producers (although America, russia, and the middle east also have large tar sand deposits) the only commercial use in the US is for road paving material.

Most of Canada's oil production is from heavy crude, and they are the number one exporter to the united states by volume of oil. so while people debate in the US about if Utah's tar sands are usable to make oil, we buy from Canada who've been doing this for years now, in fact they use a super large dump truck, the largest ever built, so large it needs cameras for the operator to see anything in front, behind or around him! Each tire is thirteen feet tall and weigh four tonnes each. They need to be replaced after approximately 35,000 miles; at a cost of $25,000.00 a piece.

Holographic Storage

[Moosechees]

The same holographic storage mentioned in the article was featured on Slashdot two years ago.

http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/28/2226239

Re:Holographic Storage

[brunascle]

it's actually available, apparently, but i'm pretty sure it's ridiculously priced. it's certainly not targeted at the average consumer.

i've been anxiously waiting for news of a consumer-level product for 2 years now. alas, still not in sight.

Re:Sim Mars

[Sqweegee]

There was Mars scenario available Sim Earth released for the SNES, PC, Amiga, and a few others. There was also a Venus, Ice planet, and Desert planet... The scenarios involved terraforming the planet to support evolving life.

http://strategywiki.org/wiki/SimEarth:_The_Living_Planet

E-Film...

[tlhIngan]

Funny, but that wasn't a vaporware product... the actual device shown may have been, but before dSLRs, people could acquire "digital backs" for their SLR cameras to turn them into digital cameras. So the technology isn't new, innovative, or even vaporware. While everyone was raving over "point and shoot" digital cameras, the serious guys wanted something for their SLRs.

It was just that it easily cost around $10,000, so not many could afford them.

Then dSLRs came onto the market and that ended that reign. And these days, they're well within the reach of amateur photographers, costing not much more than a high-end point and shoot...

Re:Not so much vapourware...

[argStyopa]

"has has gaming tech progressed any further in this area? "

Depends by what you specifically mean by 'progressed'.

Has gaming graphically improved? Hell yes. Look at the current tech demos for Age of Conan - particularly someone swimming in the water - and you'll be impressed. And this isn't some specifically rendered scene in a single player game. This is an open-activity world meant for hundreds and thousands of simultaneous players.

Has gaming developed substantially better tools in terms of multiple people interacting on the same virtual world? Hell yes. See my point about AoC above. The interactivity of multi user persistent worlds is miles beyond what you mention. (Note - I should mention Second Life. For some reason they get a lot of attention here and the pop-press, but they are at least a *decade* behind what I would say is the minimum standard today for Massively Online Persistent worlds. Don't use what you see there as any sort of benchmark for what is "today".)

Have VR tools advanced substantially? Again, yes. Recently I've seen 360-degree displays in extraordinarily high resolution, along with motion sensor technology that's amazingly precise, even some kludged from the Wii controller. What's really impressed me is that I saw a 'cage' motion simulator that was essentially a hollow-ball of a cage that you could stand in, so that you could MOVE in a VR world, from walking to running, and your avatar would move.

Has the synthesis of these things advanced? Less than you might think. I think the gaming industry has seen that there really isn't much of a market for VR systems. I could speculate on a number of reasons:
- most consumers seem to be perfectly happy with the current experience*
- most consumers couldn't currently afford even the top-end 2d-computer-vr gear, much less 3d stuff
- unsolved human equilibrium problems. If every sense is telling you you're riding in a spinning teacup, but your inner-ear disagrees, that's a recipe for motionsickness. Not many find that an entertaining time.

* because ultimately, it's about suspension of disbelief. Let's say I could have the ultimate home-VR experience - a headset that displays in perfect 3d, with perfect 3d sound, photorealistic resolution, I don't get dizzy, etc. I'm still just sitting there. There's still going to be a requirement for a user-interface that lets me move & function as if I was there. Will the increase in visual/audio realism (only) be worth the increase in price, while VR is hobbled by the need for some sort of human input device? Personally, I don't think so.

Re:Google Mail

[nacturation]

No, that's a release candidate. Sorry, you're mistaken.

Beta: Beta level software generally includes all features, but may also include known issues and bugs of a less serious variety.
Release Candidate: The term release candidate refers to a version with potential to be a final product, ready to release unless fatal bugs emerge.

Re:Google Mail

[C0vardeAn0nim0]

just because it's not open source, doesn't mean they can't use the "release early, release often" method.

for MS, CA, oracle, etc. to release a major version of their products, it's a pain. pressing CDs/DVDs, shipping them, retraing tech support, etc. now, for google, it's as easy as FTPing the new code to a server, that's why "release early, release often" works for GOOG, and not for the others.

and since it's in perpetual beta, they don't even have to bother with support. they're not obligated to give support for something that's essentially a prototype.