The Vaporware Rolls In
August 1996
We declared July Intranet Month at the TrendsLetter. We have so much to write about in the Intranet space we have to think of schemes to organize it all. In June Microsoft, Netscape, and Lotus all declared their Intranet strategies. Novell has begun to chime in, too. Now it's our job to try to sort these strategies out and make some sense out of them. We will have separate articles on Lotus and Microsoft and then a summary article on Comparative Intranet Strategies which includes many other vendors (e.g., Netscape, Novell, Oracle, Digital, etc.). We are thinking about developing this article into a separate White Paper.
If you're wondering why Netscape didn't get its own article it's because we think that pre-announcing a strategy that's 18 months out is called vaporware and we're not sure at what level we want to encourage this kind of behavior. On the one hand, as an analyst, we like to see any information, however frail or premature. On the other hand, as consultants, we know that when major players in an industry pre-announce, customers aren't sure what to do: should they wait for all these exciting (but unavailable) new features or should they consider it an interesting but essentially not actionable piece of information and go ahead and select from existing real products? It's very easy for future products to be very exciting because:
- they don't actually have to do anything in the real world yet -- just glimmer enticingly at some far-away horizon -- and
- they're not available and this very non-availability makes them seem more desirable
Therefore, these pre-announcements have a tendency to interrupt markets, causing them to slow down and wait for the vaporware. We'd predict, in this case, slowing down is not available. In the super-heated world of the Internet, no one has the patience to wait for much. Usually staid corporations are building mission critical applications on the betaware of tiny companies they wouldn't ordinarily give the time of day -- much less their precious data -- with wild-eyed webmasters and net gurus as their consultants. That is why companies like Lotus and Microsoft are rushing their strategies and products to market -- and why you're likely to see more rushing, more mergers and acquisitions, and more chaos in the next year or so.
There will still be plenty of room for Netscape and others in the Intranet market in 18 months, but it will be a market that will already have strong market leaders, less likely to make way for a new product. On the other hand, maybe Netscape's charisma is -- like Steve Jobs' in days of old -- such a good reality distortion field, -- that customers believe it already is the leader in the Intranet market.
In that case, we're playing two games -- one of perceptions and one In Real Life (IRL) -- and they're not the same. The problem is, the "real" products have to convince the perceptions buyers (the waiters) that you can't eat hope and that real products are necessarily less exciting, but more fulfilling, than future dreams. The perception products sell expectations: how good it's going to be when it happens and hope that customers will choose to wait long enough -- at least for an early beta.
In this market, it's hard to tell whether customers would prefer buying real products or thinking about tomorrow's dreams.
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