[wccrawford]

Reason #3: The boy who cried vaporware. If you end up with a history of advertising vaporware, nobody will listen when you finally get it right.

If you are super amazing and you can get your first product to market, this obviously doesn't apply. But most people aren't. And most of those who do, they're just lucky.

Reason #4: Duke Nukem Forever will be out any day now. If you take too long to get it to market, your product will be a joke and people will lose interest.

[patio11]

Can anyone recall the names of the two products I announced on my blog and then abandoned for various reasons? Was anyone here even aware that happened at all?

Just failing isn't nearly enough to get people to remember you. You have to be truly epic to be remembered for that. (How many enterprise deployments go years late for every Slashdot joke about Duke Nukem again?)

[Poiesis]

Only one I remember is Kalzumeus, which I think was a rental property management webapp for targeted for single-family residences as opposed to apartment buildings and the like. Was going to have awesome integration with Paypal. I could be wrong, that's from memory and I could be confusing you with someone else.

[kristiandupont]

Can you think of a person who has been advertising vaporware that you would not listen to? I don't think that I can.

A similar claim is that people won't give a bad product a second chance, even after many years. But the point is, unless you launch like Cuil, you won't have many users in the beginning. So if some percentage of those few hundred people lose faith, it could be a small price to pay for the knowledge you will gain.

As for Duke Nukem Forever, if it came out today there would be plenty of interest. It might be considered a joke but that is only really a threat someones ego. Of course, it is a financial threat as well but that is because of the massive development costs, not marketing that back-fired.

[loewenskind]

>Can you think of a person who has been advertising vaporware that you would not listen to?

Microsoft. I ignore anything they say until they have something I can actually buy. They've made too many announcements that were just never spoken of again.

[coliveira]

Ok, so your example just shows that you can be super successful using the vaporware strategy...

[kranner]

Only if that's all there was to Microsoft's success.

[loewenskind]

Their successful in spite of announcing a lot of vaporware, but their biggest win of all; windows was top secret until it was released, right?

[krakensden]

My understanding was that the first release of Windows came a long time after the initial announcement, but it was a little before my time.

Microsoft's usual strategy, that no one has explicitly stated yet, is to try and discourage its customers from buying a product by promising the moon 'just around the corner' for a couple years. Microsoft is seen as a better long term bet, and this depresses sales even though it doesn't actually have a product yet, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy of the failure of its competitors.

So when people are angrily referring to Microsoft vaporware, that's what they're talking about.

[thomas11]

Reason #5: You're not at all sure what exactly the idea of the final product will be. You've got ideas bouncing around in your head and you want to try them to get a feel for what might be a real product.

[zacharycohn]

I have a half-joking pet theory that Duke Nukem Forever is the greatest marketing ploy of all time. Their plan was to announce this game, do enough development to release a teaser every 5 years or so, and then wait until 2008 to REALLY start development of it.

Greatest hype machine ever, and never doubt the Duke..