Hardware, Software, Vaporware

By Philip Elmer-DeWitt

Last June Steven Ballmer, a vice president of Microsoft, told the press that his company would ship an important new program called Windows "before the snow falls." Microsoft made the deadline with a day to spare, despite early blizzards last fall. But the arrival of Windows, which gives an IBM computer the look and feel of an Apple Macintosh, could hardly be described as timely. Ballmer had previously announced four different release dates for the program, beginning with April 1984, and Microsoft had missed them all. In the parlance of Silicon Valley, the software had turned into vaporware, a product that is marketed before it exists.

Delays and broken promises have bedeviled the computer business since its birth some 35 years ago. The program that runs the IBM System/360 mainframe computer, for example, arrived six months later than first promised. Frederick Brooks, who managed the project in the mid-'60s, anatomized the problem in a book called The Mythical Man-Month and concluded that it is in the nature of , software to require more time than is scheduled.

Despite this history of slippage, many fledgling personal-computer companies are still selling smoke by heralding the imminent availability of hardware and software that is not even half finished. Vaporware has dented the credibility of the technology, frightened investors and given wary consumers one more reason to hold off buying their first computer.

The source of the problem is the gap between what people want their machines to do and what the technology can deliver. With computer software in particular it is easy to turn an idea for a program into a prototype that works well enough to demonstrate to potential customers, and then quickly announce it to get a jump on competitors. But before any product can be released, it may require months of refining, reworking and retesting. Hiring more programmers to speed up the job often makes matters worse. As Brooks put it, "The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned."

Some computer companies that tried to rush Mother Nature have ended up filing for bankruptcy or merging with other firms. Among the best-known casualties: VisiCorp, Osborne and Gavilan. Even mighty IBM is not immune to the vaporware syndrome. Two years ago the company fell so far behind schedule with the PCjr that it was forced to postpone delivery of its eagerly awaited home computer until after the Christmas sales rush. Apple, meanwhile, has still not delivered the large disk drive that was to have been the centerpiece of the Macintosh Office announced with great hoopla early in 1985. According to Stewart Alsop II, who publishes a vaporlist of tardy technology in his P.C. Letter, the problem has reached the point where "consumers often cannot tell what is being sold and what is just being talked about." Even Lotus, which earned a reputation for finishing best-selling programs like 1-2-3 and Symphony right on schedule, had its comeuppance this spring, when a Lotus program called Jazz boogied to market nearly two months late. Says Chairman Mitch Kapor: "It was like losing our virginity." One software publisher, Ansa, has adopted the policy of IBM, which usually declines to discuss products before they have been shipped to dealers. But other firms still deal in vapor. At a recent trade show, Atari announced the names of 138 programs being written for its new ST machine. Only 44 were available.

Not everyone thinks that Wizard of Oz products are bad. "There's nothing wrong with vaporware," says Daniel Bricklin, co-author of VisiCalc. Bricklin believes prototypes were crucial to that product's eventual success. "With VisiCalc," he says, "nobody knew what I was talking about until I wrote the program." To spare others that inconvenience, he has created something he calls Dan Bricklin's Demo Program, which enables a software developer to construct a convincing demonstration even if the software has not yet been written. Bricklin calls his product "a vaporware generator." But it is not quite ready for market. "It will be done," he says, "as soon as I've got all the bugs out of it."

With reporting by Lawrence Mondi/New York