Vaporware are products that are marketed heavily in the form of concepts and even have campaigns to raise money to produce them but are still being manufactured or never actually released. This happens routinely in the hardware and software industries.
For example…
Let’s rewind in time to the year 1983. When the computer world was talking about the still-new IBM PC and the MS-DOS operating system, Ovation Technologies announced that it would provide a Word processing package to include word processing, spreadsheet functionality and database management. A year later, the company announced bankruptcy, having chewed through seven million dollars of investors’ money without having produced a single product. I chose to give you this example of Vapourware because it is said to be the reason the term was coined!
