No more expectations?

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For about eight years now, Wired has been running an annual Vaporware contest in which they give dubious awards to software (and sometimes hardware) titles that have been promised over the past year (or years) but haven't materialized on the shelf (or for downloading). Many of these awards are for games which are apparently awaited with bated breath, until the entire issue becomes a joke. There are titles that receive this award year after year, though apparently some people still think there's a chance of actually installing them, sometime in the future, on their computers.

But Web 2.0 and the idea of the perpetual beta are perhaps initiating a different perspective on at least some of the potential vaporware awardees. If, as O'Reilly tells us, one of the characteristics of Web 2.0 tools is "the end of the software release cycle", certain title may never actually achieve a final, formal release, and yet not be vaporware. Number three on Wired's list, for instance, is Google, with "betas galore". Yet what from an Web 1.0 point of view is a shortcoming, from a Web 2.0 point of view is actually the way things should work. Google is forever tweaking its tools, sometimes fine tuning, sometimes making major changes, and all the while letting us try our hand at them to see whether they're actually useful to us. If nothing else, Web 2.0 seems to be redefining vaporware.

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