Here's a quote from a 1998 Vaporware article.
Microsoft Windows NT 5.0, also known as Windows 2000, is, by popular consensus, the year's biggest broken promise. In an age when software cycles are as short as four months, Windows 2000 has been in the works since 1996, when the product was code-named Cairo. It isn't expected to hit shelves until late 1999.
This is the second year Microsoft has won a vaporware prize. In last year's awards, a Microsoft spokesperson said the 5.0 version would ship in the second half of 1998 while analysts and other industry watchers said that 1999 was a more realistic time frame. Earlier this year, Microsoft announced that Windows NT 5.0 wouldn't ship until 1999, and then in October the company renamed the product line "Windows 2000."
Now from the same magazine for 1999
1. And the winner is ... First promised in 1997. Delayed until mid-1998. Rescheduled until sometime in 1999. And now, definitively, set to ship on 17 February, 2000. The winner, and returning champion, is Microsoft's Windows 2000.
What can we say? Its tortured history speaks for itself. Readers tend to agree -- most didn't even bother to add comments to Win2K nominations.
"The ultimate in vaporware," said Larry Herbison.
"I don't believe anything that MS says about release dates anymore," sniffed Daniel Scheffler.
Some contributors even suggested Microsoft deliberately delayed Win2K because of Y2K.
"Was it really just them debugging their always-faulty OS or are they just worried about January 1st?" quizzed Scott Hiett, cruelly suggesting that Redmond change the name to "Windows 1900."
AI
