Not true netman, but that website is no longer accessible.. so I guess we won't know. My intention is to help people who use this board to be discerning when looking at s/w companies and to separate reality from wishful thinking, with a realistic appreciation of what uWink can/ cannot do with it's relatively small 4-person development staff. It is in their best interest to do that. I get that number from the R&D budget listed in F/S, btw.
I can give 2 good examples of when the term vaporware would be applied. In the late 90's Oracle, then a database vendor, decided to get into the application business. They had a road show and gave a good presentation. Everybody viewing it realized what it was. It is a somewhat mocking slang term that is used. Similarly to a vendor referring to an "anomaly" or an "undocumented feature" when it is really a bug and they are just letting customers do testing. Testing is expensive and that is one way s/w companies save money. uWink, as an example, has a big advantage with it's restaurants in this area.. as long as they don't mind putting people off when new features do not work as intended. In the late 90's the players were Baan, Peoplesoft, SAP, etc. Now Oracle is an established player, along with SAP.. and maybe a few others. They were succesful in their efforts to develop applications.
A more personal example occurred when I was with Nortel in the mid-90's. A VP of Engineering put on a show of what was supposedly production software and presented it to a VP from Nortel that was looking at the operation. When pressed, and that is important, it came out that the software was a one-time effort, a facade, a mock-up for the purpose of that presentation and that this division of Nortel had no production software ready. It was hard-coded and lacked any of the architectural ot scalability features of production code. The VP was later fired. I actually liked the guy. He was trying to get something done, just did not work out. Due to a number of factors (changing requirements, political problems, etc) in 4 years of existence that group just could not get any production software written.
2 great examples of vaporware. I hope that the readers of this board can be discerning and realistic about what uWink can and cannot do. I am not the one being stupid, ignorant or anything else. Quite the opposite. When I see a sales presentation I know just the questions to ask to tell what is relaly there. I hope readers of this can as well.
If my input is hot helpful, then you and anyone elses are quite welcome to put me on ignoe and believe anything you want. You only hurt yourselves.
