“Vaporware” an unneccesary insult
2 December 2006
While usually I trust his opinion, professional blogger John Gruber overzealously lambasted the Omni Group, calling their forthcoming new application “Vaporware“. While it’s true that the Omni Group has two posts about their not-yet-ready GTD application, they’re still not hawking $1200 keyboards. Not only is his use of the dictionary pedantic and sophomoric, but Gruber also ignores the context of why Omni might posts these announcements.
My guess is that application developers are a little jealous of the hype produced by open-source development, where users can and do follow product releases, help with Q&A from the beginning and excitement builds as the product nears completion.
Regardless the dictionary definition, “Vaporware” in every circle I’ve ran in, connotes a product promised, hyped, and in bad faith left undelivered. By calling OmniFocus vaporware, Gruber is calling the Omni Group liars.
Giving a cursory look over their forums, the development has been followed very closely–most posts have over a hundred, many over five hundred views, including “We need an update!” posted a week before the “Not really an update” blog post.
Also, based on the forum conversations I followed during the OmniWeb sneaky peak, Omni Group forum readers amount to ravenous hordes who are pretty demanding, and for those of us who don’t build applications, the time involved in finalizing an app tends to drag–we want to know what’s going on. With Firefox one can check bugzilla, milestones, etc., but with a closed-source developer one must wait, patiently, and ask nicely for updates.
Regardless his stance on pre-announcing software, Gruber discounts the entire Omni Group community, focusing only on the larger GTD market. I wouldn’t even look up the definition of GTD, but if Omni makes an app I might: worse-case scenario it’s going to be beautifully designed and intuitive to use. He’s taking an unfair swipe at a company that has a pretty good track record of producing excellent software.
““Vaporware” in every circle I’ve ran in, connotes a product promised, hyped, and in bad faith left undelivered. By calling OmniFocus vaporware, Gruber is calling the Omni Group liars.”
It seems to me that the product has been promised, hyped and hasn’t yet been delivered. Gruber is simply pointing out the facts. Even if one accepts your suggestion of “bad faith” it doesn’t mean lying. John doesn’t say that and neither does he imply that. I think we can all assume that if Omni post about something like this that they can be believed. The question is when? Even they admit to only having two developers working on the project at the moment because they are trying to get a final release of OmniPlan out of the door.
Oh, come on! It’s classic vaporware: big dog pre-announces software to discourage people from going to an alternative before they can get product out the door. Yes, the product will ship, but do you really think it would’ve been pre-announced if the other Mac GTD product weren’t starting to shape up?
It’s working, of course (take me for example — there’s no way I’ll start using Midnight Inbox until OmniFocus has shipped or been extensively previewed, because I know Omni has a history of wonderful software). I don’t even have a problem with Omni making a vaporware announcement; in the best cases, vaporware is an important tool for both the company and the consumer.
But it’s disingenuous to say it’s not vaporware because we like Omni. Vaporware is very widely applied to products that do, indeed, ship (the most famous vaporware product, of course, is Windows — pick a version, from 1.0 [two years late] on up).
By pre-announcing, a software company with sufficient clout can discourage consumers from using an alternative product and discourage developers with less clout from even trying to enter a market. That’s the vaporware technique, and make no mistake, that’s the reason Omni pre-announced.
I will third the vaporware label: the Omni Group blew it on this one. They keep talking about OmniFocus, but deliver nothing. They need to put some code where their mouths are, or shut up about it.
Vaporware insults, part 2…
Wow–I’m really taking a beating on this one.
Without a doubt, the decision to pre-announce software may not be a good one.
I still think, however, that my commenters discount the Omni cult following. There
are many people who want to be in…
this is ridiculous. what, everything we have foreknowledge of is vaporware until we can hold it in our hands? the only difference is in degree??? that’s preposterous (and yet it seems that’s exactly the stance gruber has taken). we all know what we “mean” when we call something vaporware, and to pretend anything else is disingenuous. i might give gruber a little more credence, but he decided to throw in the last-second jab of potentially comparing it to omniplan, which in his first missive was a “TURD” but then he quietly changed it to a “MONSTER.” good thing i have a good memory about such things, and it certainly hurst his credibility in an debate such as this.
plus, it didn’t help that, if it wasn’t meant to be taken so “seriously,” he still decided to leave his defense as the main headline all weekend long. I love daringfireball, but in this case, he was a dick. Period.
of course, i meant “hurts his credibility…” guess I tripped over my own fingers on that one.