Vaporware - Etymology

Etymology

The first reported use of the word "vaporware" was in 1982 by an engineer at the computer software company Microsoft. Ann Winblad, who was president of Open Systems Accounting Software, wanted to know if Microsoft planned to stop developing its Xenix operating system. Some of Open System's products depended on it. She went to Microsoft's offices, and asked two software engineers there, John Ulett and Mark Ursino, who confirmed that development of Xenix had stopped. "One of them told me, 'Basically, it's vaporware'," she later said. Winblad compared the word to the idea of "selling smoke", implying Microsoft was selling a product it would soon not support.

The word was told by Winblad to influential computer expert Esther Dyson, and Dyson published it for the first time in her monthly printed newsletter RELease 1.0. In an article titled "Vaporware" in the November 1983 issue of RELease 1.0, Dyson defined the word as "good ideas incompletely implemented". She described three software products shown at the Computer Dealer's Exhibition in Las Vegas that year that were being advertised bombastically. In her words, demonstrations of the "purported revolutions, breakthroughs and new generations" shown at the exhibition did not meet those claims.

After Dyson's article was published, the word became popular among writers in the then small personal computer software industry as a way to describe products they felt took too long to be released after their first announcement. InfoWorld magazine editor Stewart Alsop helped popularize its use in this way by lampooning Bill Gates, then CEO of Microsoft, with a Golden Vaporware award for the 18-month late release of Microsoft's first version of Windows in 1985. Alsop presented it to Gates at a celebration for the release while the song "The Impossible Dream" played in the background.

"Vaporware" took another meaning when it was used to describe a product that did not exist. A new company named Ovation Technologies announced their office suite Ovation in 1983. The company invested in an advertising campaign that promoted Ovation as a "great innovation", and showed a demonstration of the program at computer trade shows. The demonstration was well received by writers in the press, featured in a cover story for an industry magazine, and reportedly created anticipation among potential customers. It was later revealed by executives that Ovation never existed. The fake demonstration was created in an attempt by the company to raise money to finish their product, but they could not. This was the first time the word "vaporware" was used to imply intentional fraud, and is "widely considered the mother of all vaporware," according to Laurie Flynn of The New York Times.

"Vaporware", sometimes synonymous with "vaportalk" in the 1980s, has no single definition. It is generally used to describe a hardware or software product that has been announced by its developer, but that has not yet been released. Use of the term has gradually become more inclusive in the last three decades. Newsweek magazine's Allan Sloan described the manipulation of stocks by Yahoo! and Amazon.com as "financial vaporware" in 1997. Popular Science magazine uses a scale ranging from "vaporware" to "bet on it" to describe release dates of new consumer electronics. Car manufacturer General Motors' plans to develop and sell an electric car were called vaporware by an advocacy group in 2008.