Alterego-X said:
Give some example, please. When I saw the announcement, the first thing that came to my mind was exactly the Surface. IT HAD THE SAME TECH-DEMO! The whole "painting with your hands" part, and the "messing with water surface" part, were in it! I tried a Surface model a few months ago, and it was exactly the same as the one presented 2 years ago! I played with the painting, and the water, but there was nothing else. They are sitting on it, and sometimes bringing it up on shows to prove that they are that creative.
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Let's see what he cites as examples of vaporware:
- Cairo was a set of technologies about information sharing. It never became a product, but it gave birth to the content indexer and search services (currently implemented in real software) and gave birth to the WinFS project, see later.
- Longhorn was the codename for what later became Vista. Some of the developed and previewed technologies saw the light as actual features (revamped video driver subsystem, least privilege security policy, WPF libraries). Others, and most notably WinFS, didn't. But this much touted project for a database-like abstraction layer over the actual filesystem reached alpha stage, developers were actually involved in testing and integrating and was finally cut for performance/compatibility/reliability problems. It was moved to the SQLServer domain and will surely raise once again in a future OS version. It's a good idea whose time has almost come, and similar projects were pursued by open source developers.
- Surface was about experimenting with multitouch interfaces. They are the big thing right now in mobile devices, and are creeping their way in laptops and kiosks. Surely it won't be long before every general-purpose OS will need to be able to deal with multipointer interfaces. That required changes to the Xserver under Linux and to core libraries under OSX. Surely similar libraries were developed for the computer at the heart of Surface, work that will be used in Windows Mobile devices and in future Windows releases. Also, by giving this technology to tech partners as a testing ground for real applications opened the way to experimentation about which human interfaces work and which don't with multitouch.
The fact is that MS mainly caters to developers, and they're damn good at that. Some of it is marketing and hype, but most of it is honest and serious - if not revolutionary - work on the tools.
This Malstrom guy labeled them as vaporware because they didn't end wrapped in a nice package as a product for the final consumer, but that's not what all projects in a big company like MS are about. And having made this mistake, he goes on to extrapolate that we'll never see what MS clearly means to be a real, actual product. Faulty logic based on false assumptions.
