Although this is frustrating at times, it is a refreshing change from some companies' practice of announcing a product even before its design is finished". In a January 1982 review of the new IBM Personal Computer, BYTE favorably noted that IBM "refused to acknowledge the existence of any product that is not ready to be put on dealers' shelves tomorrow. The practice existed before Winblad's account. She stated that demonstrations of the "purported revolutions, breakthroughs and new generations" at the exhibition did not meet those claims. She described three software products shown at COMDEX in Las Vegas that year with bombastic advertisements. In an article titled "Vaporware" in the November 1983 issue of RELease 1.0, Dyson defined the word as "good ideas incompletely implemented". Winblad described the word to influential computer expert Esther Dyson, who published it for the first time in her monthly newsletter RELease 1.0. Influential writer Esther Dyson (pictured here in 2008) popularized the term "vaporware" in her November 1983 issue of RELease 1.0. Winblad compared the word to the idea of "selling smoke", implying Microsoft was selling a product it would soon not support. "One of them told me, 'Basically, it's vaporware'," she later said. She asked two Microsoft software engineers, John Ulett and Mark Ursino, who confirmed that development of Xenix had stopped. Ann Winblad, president of Open Systems Accounting Software, wanted to know if Microsoft planned to stop developing its Xenix operating system as some of Open System's products depended on it. The first reported use of the word was in 1982 by an engineer at the computer software company Microsoft. It is generally used to describe a hardware or software product that has been announced, but that the developer is unlikely to release any time soon, if ever. "Vaporware", sometimes synonymous with "vaportalk" in the 1980s, has no single definition. InfoWorld magazine editor Stewart Alsop helped popularize it by lampooning Bill Gates with a Golden Vaporware award for the late release of his company's first version of Windows in 1985. It became popular among writers in the industry as a way to describe products they felt took too long to be released. "Vaporware" was coined by a Microsoft engineer in 1982 to describe the company's Xenix operating system and appeared in print at least as early as the May 1983 issue of Sinclair User magazine (spelled as 'Vapourware' in UK English). The United States accused several companies of announcing vaporware early enough to violate antitrust laws, but few have been found guilty. Seven major companies issued a report in 1990 saying that they felt vaporware had hurt the industry's credibility. Network World magazine called vaporware an "epidemic" in 1989 and blamed the press for not investigating if developers' claims were true. Developers have been accused of intentionally promoting vaporware to keep customers from switching to competing products that offer more features. Vaporware is often announced months or years before its purported release, with few details about its development being released. Use of the word has broadened to include products such as automobiles. In the computer industry, vaporware (or vapourware) is a product, typically computer hardware or software, that is announced to the general public but is late, never actually manufactured, or officially cancelled. Justice Department accused IBM of intentionally announcing its IBM System/360 Model 91 computer (pictured) nearly two years early to hurt sales of its competitor's computer.
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