Vaporware: It’s the venerable term for products which are announced but never reach the market. What lessons can IT pros learn from the mistakes that developers of vaporware make? How can you make sure that your company’s important products aren’t vaporous?

I can’t think of a better example of vaporware than Duke Nukem Forever, a game which has been repeatedly announced since 1997 and has never even gotten close to reaching the market. (It probably never will, since all developers working on this project were fired). The game’s developers made two major mistakes,  with plenty of lessons for everybody dealing with projects.

First and foremost was the lack of planning. There was no schedule for the project itself,  nor one for smaller milestones along the way, so the developers could clearly see that the project was going in the right direction. It’s simply very hard to complete a project if there is no schedule associated with it.

The second major mistake was a mix of ego and sidetracking. Every time the project leader saw a new technology, he wanted to add it to the mix. If you keep doing this in the IT industry, you will never finish your project, since new technologies get released almost every day. You have to make a plan and stick to it. Of course changes will be necessary along the way, but not major changes that would involve starting the whole project from scratch (which is what happened with Duke Nukem Forever).

It’s also interesting to note another factor that helped Duke Nukem Forever achieve the status of vaporware: too much cash on hand. Sometimes people that are used to working with a very tight budget are more productive–after all, they have to finish their projects to survive and be very creative to compensate for the lack of financial resources. When a tremendous amount of money is available, some developers vsimply get lost and don’t know what to do.

But insufficient planing, megalomania, and paralysis are not the only reasons a product can become vaporware. Competition can do this as well. Say you are developing a product and when it is time to market it you discover that there is a similar product that has just been launched that is better and costs half as much. Instead of going ahead and spending money to push your product, you can simply decide to cut your losses and never release it.

Which brings up a very important question: Why announce a product that is not even close to completion anyway? Ego? “Testing the waters”? Pleasing investors? Trying to boost the company stock price? As my mom used to say, “a shut mouth catches no flies.” Some people simply forget the importance of this old proverb.

Gabriel Torres is the editor-in-chief of Hardware Secrets, a US-based website about PC hardware.