What Does This Mean?
A hardware or software product that is announced to the public but is badly delayed, cancelled, never released or falls short of what was promised. It is used critically for hype that does not turn into a shipped product.
REAL-WORLD EXAMPLE
""The startup has shown the same demo for three years, so people call the gadget vaporware.""
LORE & ORIGIN
Wikipedia reports that a Microsoft engineer reportedly used the word in 1982 when asked about the Xenix operating system, and that Esther Dyson popularised it in the November 1983 issue of RELease 1.0, defining it as good ideas incompletely implemented. Examples it lists include Ovation (1983), which executives later admitted never existed, and Duke Nukem Forever, announced in 1997 and released in 2011. The page says the practice predates the word, and that the word later also covered products that never existed at all.
MENTIONS OVER TIME
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