Vaporware

Vaporware is a term used to describe a software or hardware product that is announced by a developer well in advance of release, but which then fails to emerge after having well exceeded the period of development time that was initially claimed or would normally be expected for the development cycle of a similar product.

The term originated with magazine reviewers in the late 1970s/early 80s, originally as parody of software marketers' tendency to attach -ware to whatever noun described the application of their products.At that time the personal computer market was in its infancy, and it was common for computer manufacturers to supply the software that ran on them, which would rarely work on other manufacturers' machines.Software development would often lag behind the development of the system's computer hardware. As a result, some computer manufacturers advertised extravagant software packages that allegedly came with their machines, but had not yet been completed, or in some cases, hardly begun, in an effort to sell their hardware and encourage further software development.

Common examples of Vaporware are Duke Nukem Forever, Micorosft Windows “Longhorn”, Half Life, Team Fortress 2etc..

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