I appreciate your editorial on this issue, but I think you lack the contextual experience to criticize it. Specifically, planning/productivity applications (which include GTD apps) are frameworks inside which people structure their entire work process. Some even plan their lives (goals, meals, fitness) in them. While all techno-junkies are on the lookout for something even better, all the time, giving up your framework is a massive upheaval. To switch from one productivity system to another means exporting data, most likely manually converting, archiving, and entering old data in the new system. This involves spending superfluous time and effort, for which the payoff is uncertain.

That is why users won’t try both. Omni’s announcement is a vaporware cannonball fired across the bow of Midnight Inbox, ThinkingRock, Actiontastic, TiddlyWikiGTD, and the handful of other <1.0s who have surfaced this year. Everyone knows Omni builds exceptional products, so it’s much easier for people to wait for the Omni dream app than risk their chances with one of the others. ThinkingRock is spectacular, but lacks OS integration. Inbox, beautiful and buggy, just hit 1.0 and is now developing a huge, active user community contributing to its growing feature set. Actiontastic is already rocking Quicksilver. But see, in our Omni dream land, Omni’s going to build an app that does everything these do, prints index cards, reminds us to do some yoga every few hours, watches our caloric intake, and asks our directors for raises. That’s why people are waiting.

So it’s not that Omni did anything “wrong.” Marketing is a tricky business and anything goes. They’ve taken advantage of their great reputation by announcing plans for a product, probably in effort to keep potential users from adopting other systems from which later transition would be difficult. In doing so, however, they have fulfilled the definition of releasing vaporware.

P.S. I mainly use ThinkingRock on OS X, but am enthusiastic about Midnight Inbox and believe it could replace TR in a few months.

Vaporware is clearly an insult and that’s the way its been used for years in the industry.

I’m not an Omni fanatic, but I’m involved in product development so I feel for the Omni guys on this one.

I find it strange that Omni gets called out on this when pre-announcing a product is clearly the small company marketing strategy of choice used by many Mac, web app, windows… hell you make software, you give away a little bit, everyone does, you have to in this day and age. Even super-secret Apple does.

I might also point out that Joyent used this strategy back in 2005, that John talked about Joyent on his blog before new features were announced, all the cool stuff it would do, and never once called his company’s pre-announced product “vaporware.”

Take, for example, his small link to Joyent’s 2.0 UI “Preview” (vaporware by his definition I guess). This is a small example and I’m not after John, but just do a search for Joyent on his archives.

But since Dave is his friend, I guess its a link to a preview and not Vaporware.

The Omni Group isn’t that big of a
player in the software market.

And GTD isn’t that big of a market. If they release their GTD app, they are the big fish in the small pond. I’m looking for a GTD app, but I’ll wait for Omni’s offering. If that was their intention, it’s working.