Latest / Nonsense with cj little and Jeff Parker / Vaporware: Products That Will Change Your Life … Maybe!

Transcript

Vaporware: Products That Will Change Your Life … Maybe! · Nonsense with cj little and Jeff Parker

0:00
Welcome to Nonsense Season 4 Episode 5, our big story and our
0:02
second show of the week. I'm Jeff Parker.
0:04
I'm. This time we're looking at
0:05
vaporware products that will change your life.
0:08
Maybe up next I would. Normally I would just say show
0:11
me the live demo but now even those are getting like people
0:14
are even faking those more and more.
0:15
They've been faking those for years.
0:16
I know, I know. You're just like, oh, this
0:18
robot's amazing. And you're like, there's a guy
0:19
coughing in a room in Salinas and you're just like, oh, it's
0:22
the only way the grift could happen.
0:23
They had to do. It they didn't have to, of
0:25
course they didn't have to, but they did.
0:27
Let's talk about some vaporware. What do you got?
0:29
I'm trying to lead us in of the segment.
0:31
We promised a segment, now we have to deliver.
0:33
We have to but or OR it would be more fitting if we just didn't
0:37
and rolled the closing music and got the hell out of here.
0:39
Let's just go quiet. Let's just get.
0:41
Just 25 minutes of silence. I like that idea.
0:44
Fool me once. I'll say this little teaser line
0:47
and play the music and then we'll just.
0:48
I'll go get coffee. And we'll just go quiet.
0:50
That'll be great. Perfect.
0:51
OK, vaporware, bold announcements, glossy mock ups
0:54
and release dates that ignore commitment.
0:56
Let's go. And show.
1:09
Vaporware is the tech industry's ultimate ghost story.
1:11
A product that's announced with world changing fanfare, marketed
1:14
with slick trailers often funded by 1,000,000, yet never actually
1:17
exists. It lives in the purgatory
1:19
between founders, ambition and a developer's nightmare.
1:22
Sometimes vaporware is born from feature creep, the obsessive
1:24
need to add 1 more bell or whistle until the project
1:27
collapses under its own weight. Other times, it's a calculated
1:30
smokescreen designed to freeze the market, scaring customers
1:32
away from competitors while a company scrambles to build what
1:35
they've already promised. Hyperloop.
1:38
Are you putting footnotes in now?
1:40
From $700 million Forever games to revolutionary blood testers,
1:44
vaporware represents the dark side of fake it till you make
1:47
it. It's the graveyard of broken
1:48
promises where visionaries become villains and the only
1:51
thing that truly ships is the hype.
1:53
That was well said. I feel you should get a a
1:55
Peabody or a Webby or something for that.
1:57
That was that was. I'm just like God.
1:59
Can we break this up into three sections?
2:00
Yeah, please. There's because you and I are
2:02
going to go all over the place and then I kind of want to
2:04
somewhat keep at least a loose structure.
2:05
Here first section shit that Elon has hasn't done we.
2:08
Probably have to cover some Elon if we get time products that
2:11
their creators were really trying to get out but didn't OK,
2:14
things that actually got delivered but that didn't last
2:17
because they missed the market. Sure.
2:18
And last products that were scams from the get go, no one
2:21
had any intention of delivering this product.
2:22
Can we? Just skip the 1st 2 and do the
2:24
last one. Those sound like way more fun.
2:26
That section is going to be a lot of fun.
2:27
You had. To put that at the end, didn't
2:28
you? All right, fine.
2:29
Well. Sure, you eat your peas before
2:31
you get you out of your cake. Grandma's rule can't.
2:32
Have any pudding to eat your meat and then we can.
2:34
Discuss what some of the real world causes and telltale signs
2:37
of vaporware might be OK. I like this, so we're going to
2:39
tell some ghost stories and then learn from it.
2:41
Section 1 yeah, products that their creators were really
2:44
trying, but sure we're not able to get them to come up this.
2:46
Wasn't a complete scam. They wanted to do it just for
2:49
some reason it never made it to Mark, correct.
2:51
There's a lot of these, you know, we talked about this
2:53
earlier this week, smartphones, There's one on the docket right
2:56
now. I'm not saying it's not going to
2:58
be delivered, but it's not going to be delivered, which is the
3:01
T1, the Trump mobile T1. Like there's no way that things
3:05
getting delivered with even a portion of the promises that
3:07
have made. I think something is going to
3:08
get delivered. By the way, to be clear, I think
3:10
a phone will be delivered. I do not believe it will be made
3:12
in the USI do not believe it'll be even remotely current by
3:14
today's standards. I'm impressed.
3:16
Do you think a phone will actually at some point be
3:17
delivered? You're probably right, I've seen
3:19
no sign of that. Just because it's, it's
3:22
relatively easy to get some inexpensive reference design
3:25
phone that a billion people on the planet use.
3:28
Yeah, that are normally priced at $27.00 US that they're going
3:31
to go ahead and mark up the 600. There's tons of commodity phones
3:34
that they can just white label, of course.
3:35
They're going to spray it gold and laser at your face on it and
3:38
away they go. Maybe right and it's going to be
3:40
the T1. I mean, they're six months late.
3:41
What are they waiting for if that's what they're going to do?
3:43
Oh. I'm not saying this what they
3:44
were going to do. I think they really thought
3:46
there was some magic phone manufacturing facility under a
3:49
mountain in South Dakota. They just they've realized it's
3:51
not there. Here's why I think they're going
3:53
to deliver it. You get to extend the grift.
3:55
You get more money by extending the grift than the $100
3:57
pre-order. So they'll pick a $27.00 phone
3:59
and they'll charge you the $400. Got that fish on the hook, man.
4:02
Right now your margin is 100%. I get it.
4:04
That's great. But I think now you can triple
4:06
your grift revenue. Grift anew.
4:08
New. Sure.
4:09
It's called G Bata. You can triple your G Bata by by
4:12
actually delivering the Walmart phone.
4:14
Yeah, I appreciate it. Why?
4:15
They don't need to. You're right.
4:16
They can just run away with the money.
4:17
But I think they can make more in the Grifty McGriff by doing
4:19
this. That's my hunch.
4:20
You're. Probably right, but I'm
4:21
surprised they haven't done it yet, if that's actually, I mean,
4:23
they are obviously I don't think this is what they're planning to
4:25
do, but I think that's probably the way to maximize their return
4:28
on. Yeah, look, let me be clear my
4:30
position here, I don't think they're in the boardroom with a
4:33
timeline going. We're gonna wait until March to
4:35
drop it, right? I think every 3rd Wednesday they
4:37
show up and try to figure figure out what they're gonna do next
4:40
and they're just like, well, maybe we just buy this one off
4:42
Aliexpress and paint it gold. I got a guy in Fresno and that's
4:45
it. I think that's like how it
4:46
works. That's my hush.
4:47
I don't know, but let the hate mail.
4:48
Fly there are some cool products that I actually looked at and
4:51
went wow, that's. Oh yeah, did.
4:52
You ever see the air power? Yes.
4:54
Apple was going to come out with this thing.
4:56
Uh huh. It was a charger.
4:57
You didn't have to line up your phone on the sweet spot or any
5:00
of that. Yeah, everything just kind of
5:01
found where you put your device. I figured it all out and and
5:04
started charging it. It was amazing.
5:05
Of all the products that I would have expected to be vapor where
5:09
this was so far down the left, I guess I was like, yeah, of
5:12
course this is, they're gonna nail this.
5:13
But apparently it's I I think it is actually hard.
5:15
It's impossible, yeah. Maybe, maybe impossible.
5:18
Maybe impossible is the right word.
5:19
That's one we don't talk about very often, right?
5:21
That's like having your it's your crazy racist uncle at
5:24
Thanksgiving where you're just like, yeah, no, no, we don't
5:26
talk about him anymore. Sure.
5:27
Their power is one that just got got sort of like.
5:29
Oh yeah, it's a physics. Problem.
5:31
It does seem like you. Overlap enough coils you end up
5:34
with just garbage. You get heat and electromagnetic
5:36
interference everywhere. It might be a physical
5:38
impossibility to do do it safely.
5:39
I feel like if you wanted to be able to also cook a chicken
5:41
breast on it then maybe it was they had a solution.
5:44
But if you didn't mind your charger bursting into flame
5:46
every now and again, it was probably a big hit.
5:48
And I remember years ago some, I think some of our listeners were
5:51
with me, we were at CES where they were demonstrating one of
5:53
the very early car chargers that was wireless where you pull the
5:57
car over and then, you know, it would charge from the ground.
6:00
And I just remember looking at their, their number specs of how
6:02
it worked. And I was like, I have a
6:04
question. What happens when something is
6:05
in between that path? And he's like, what do you mean?
6:08
I'm like, like when my cat crawls in there and he's like,
6:10
oh, sure, we have a detection mechanism.
6:12
And I was like, how does that work?
6:13
And he's like, well, we observe a decrease in the energy flow
6:16
and shut it off. And I'm like, how long does that
6:18
take? And he was like, that's pretty
6:20
fast. And I'm like, yeah, that takes
6:21
seconds. You have an X.
6:22
Cat and now you have a you have a medium rare cat is what you
6:25
have. Well, and this was kind of
6:26
interesting because Apple not only announced it, they actually
6:28
put it on packages. Yes, the Air Pods that launched
6:31
in 2019. On the box there was a picture
6:34
of this thing as if it were coming.
6:36
Out was it really? I didn't know that yeah.
6:37
Oh, that's Oh yeah, that's bit of an oopsie.
6:39
They promote things beautifully, but it was like, proved to be
6:42
like just impossible to actually make.
6:43
It was a technical nightmare. Man, there's.
6:45
Got to be some inside story on that for it to be far enough
6:47
along, then be slapping it on packaging and then then be like
6:51
just kidding. Whoopsies, right they?
6:52
Put like between 16 and 24 coils in it.
6:55
So it was very hard to put your device on this thing anywhere
6:58
where it would not be able to charge.
6:59
Yeah, sounds like a simple idea you know, we got from it.
7:01
That's really cool though. Hot dog rollers.
7:04
No, that would be great. I wouldn't mind that.
7:06
I'd buy that attachment. It was the air power with a hot
7:08
dog attachment just. Think about it.
7:09
Sure, you got the Magsafe for iPhone 12?
7:12
Oh, interesting. That came out of that instead of
7:14
think being able to just throw your device anywhere and it
7:17
automatically charges. That for alignment you.
7:18
Make a little circle of magnets and now you just toss the
7:21
charger anywhere and yeah. I wonder if the core problem was
7:24
they couldn't get enough power through like you.
7:25
Like you could get it to work but only at, you know, whatever
7:27
3 watts you're like, well that's not interesting.
7:29
And then you end up needing alignment, which is what
7:31
Magsafe. Gives you perfect alignment.
7:32
Sure, you can put a. Lot more power through it 'cause
7:33
you have perfect alignment. Oh, that's really interesting.
7:35
I never thought about that. OK.
7:36
I could buy that if. You had 16 coils or 20 coils or
7:39
whatever you had. You were powering 20 coils.
7:41
Yeah, yeah, that doesn't make a lot of sense.
7:43
What you're getting there is just a lot of noise and heat.
7:45
Do you use Magsafe? Every day, all the time,
7:47
constantly. Me too and your and your phone
7:48
has the same Magsafe. Your non apple phone has the
7:51
same Magsafe connector on it. Like it'll line up and my.
7:54
Phone had it before the Apple had it.
7:55
I know this will shock you. Yeah.
7:56
Apple. What they do?
7:57
Was they. You guys just do they let you?
7:59
Yeah. They let you do before, yeah.
8:00
They let you put a case on your phone, 'cause I always have a
8:03
case on my phone and it had the magnetic ring into it, so they
8:06
were able to come out with it like almost immediate.
8:08
It's a really neat solution. I love how well it it attaches.
8:11
Like OK, that great to know that failed air power ultimately was
8:15
what gave you Magsafe. That's cool.
8:16
I don't think you get Magsafe unless you first try to do
8:18
reverse. Then realize you need alignment.
8:20
Yeah, I buy that. OK, that's great.
8:21
I appreciate your your optimism there.
8:23
Let me let me throw another one your way.
8:24
See if you can find some optimism in this.
8:25
The rabbit R1. What did that bring us?
8:28
Privacy violations left and right.
8:29
Privacy violations. I put that down the list of all
8:32
the. Name of it makes it sound like
8:33
it's going to be a sex. It's gonna be a lot more fun
8:35
than it really is. Yeah.
8:36
Yeah, it's not. Yeah, it's an AI device first.
8:38
Of all, it could be both. Anything's a sex toy.
8:40
Put your mind to it. I thought of that.
8:42
Just be clear there, the R1 was supposed to be your AI
8:47
interconnect device. Your AI for everything
8:49
interconnect. Device it's gonna record
8:51
everything you said and transcribe it and keep the text
8:53
so that you could. You were never going to use an
8:55
app ever again. You interact with the R1 and the
8:57
R1 interact with all your apps and all your websites.
8:59
Like that was sort of the high level pitch, which I'm pretty
9:02
sure not one, but both eyebrows went up on every technologist
9:06
face when this was when this was pitched.
9:07
Oh, absolutely. I am even willing to give them
9:09
rope and say, well, this is really hard in your first
9:12
version maybe doesn't deliver on all the features, but you make
9:14
some incremental improvements and you get there.
9:15
They did make a lot of incremental improvements that
9:17
that is true. They they released a lot of
9:19
software on this thing sure and it did get incrementally better.
9:21
It just never got close to what they had pitched right.
9:24
It didn't do what it was supposed to do right.
9:25
It did this other stuff that was interesting, but like my phone
9:28
does all that crap. I don't I don't need another
9:29
device for this well. The problem is your phone
9:31
actually didn't do all that crap.
9:32
Do you remember the smart Siri? The announcement, but not this
9:35
last WWDC, but the 124. Yeah, there was, I was there.
9:38
Bella Ramsey ad showed Bella Ramsey asking Siri to remind
9:42
them of somebody specific they met at a cafe like 8 months ago.
9:45
Yeah, something like that. What's that person's name?
9:47
And it's like Jeff Parker. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
9:48
Of course that never happened. Yeah, those features don't
9:51
exist. Yeah.
9:51
That was the promise of the R1, that it would be able to do
9:54
that. And of course, never it never.
9:55
Came to be, and there's a whole bunch of other stuff that Apple
9:58
was promising as part of that. Should we just run down what
10:00
they were like for smart on screen awareness?
10:02
Yeah, personal context, semantic indexing in App Actions, App
10:05
intents, App to App Actions. They're finally going to come
10:08
because Apple's made a deal with Google to put Gemini onto iOS.
10:12
Well, Gemini's not going to provide all.
10:13
Like they still have to make those interconnects.
10:15
The interconnects there are hard as well.
10:17
Yeah. But remember, there's a bunch of
10:18
other stuff that they promised that wasn't in there as well,
10:20
specifically private enclaves that I still think are very,
10:23
very hard. I still do believe they're going
10:25
to get there. They just seem to have well
10:28
underestimated how much effort that was like by an order of
10:31
magnitude, which is kind of nuts because when you were saying
10:34
earlier talking about about companies that are more well
10:35
established, Google, for example, not releasing products
10:38
before they know that they can ship, right?
10:40
It's like Kickstarters. I just can't wrap my brain
10:42
around Kickstarters. I want to help fund companies.
10:44
There are too many people that don't know what they're.
10:46
Doing If we had included Kickstarters in this episode,
10:48
this episode would be 17 hours long.
10:50
I know. But some of them are just what
10:52
we're talking about here. They're folks that had the
10:54
intention of delivering a product and they made a POC, but
10:57
didn't appreciate how much effort it takes to get that
10:59
thing from a POC to a deliverable product.
11:01
There have been a bunch of games certainly that have been various
11:05
levels of of vaporware. Some of which they eventually
11:08
got. Sometimes get shipped but like.
11:10
And they wish they hadn't gotten Yeah, because they were such bad
11:13
ideas. Yes.
11:14
The one that comes to mind when you say that is is, of course,
11:17
Duke. Duke Forever, where they
11:18
actually put forever in the name because it took forever.
11:22
Oh yeah. Which I find kind of amusing.
11:23
How long was it in development? 17 years?
11:25
Something like crazy amount of time.
11:27
I know it was over a decade. I stopped counting after a
11:28
decade. By the time it came out, it had
11:30
feature creep, right? Yeah.
11:31
Just kept every time there was a new rendering engine they'd
11:33
moved to that new Yes, it was impossible to ever release
11:36
because you're. Kind of starting.
11:37
Off. They wanted it to be the latest
11:39
and greatest and they never locked onto anything.
11:41
Nope. Never got it there there've been
11:42
a lot of other instantiations of this, but one of the ones that I
11:45
was excited about was the in television Amico, which they're
11:48
trying to build a new console just because I was an in
11:51
television fan in the first go around.
11:52
Sure, sure in late 70s and I loved the name and I thought
11:54
it'd be really fun and I like the guy who was doing it and the
11:57
approach had taken. I was like, I don't know that
11:59
this is gonna work. And, and big surprise it it
12:02
didn't, or at least it hasn't yet.
12:03
And that was in 2018, right? That was.
12:05
Eight years ago and you're so patiently waiting.
12:06
Nope, not at all. Happily playing games on other
12:09
platforms. There are no lack of platforms
12:11
for playing games. There's no reason.
12:12
But do you need another entrance in this market?
12:14
I mean, you've, you kind of have all the boxes checked.
12:16
You've got the big guys with with Sony and Xbox, sure.
12:19
You've got Steam, who's done? The steam is pretty cool.
12:22
The steam is actually really. Cool and they've that should
12:25
have never worked right. They should have never been able
12:27
to get one of those off the ground and like the Steam Deck
12:29
is really cool. Yeah, I like that machine.
12:31
Yeah, it's neat. There was a game called Project
12:33
Titan. You remember that one?
12:34
Yeah, was seven years in the making.
12:36
Lizards, right? Yeah.
12:37
Activision wizard. They pulled the plug on it,
12:38
didn't they? They never got it.
12:39
Released. I think they actually got smart
12:41
at the end and then said, wow, we're gonna just not do this.
12:43
It was literally a day game and a night game and the day game
12:46
was a SIM and the night game was a like first person shooter.
12:48
These things made no sense put together.
12:50
This is a this is a Franken, Franken game.
12:53
Yeah, it was a good seven years that they tried.
12:55
OK. Do you want to move on the next
12:56
one? There's the things that
12:57
technically did get delivered, but sort of missed the mark.
12:59
Yes, yeah, this is this was where things start to get a
13:02
little spicy, do you? Want to start with magic?
13:03
Leap. I think of this whole list of
13:05
everything we're talking about, there's a couple here that are
13:06
big standouts. To me, Magic Leap is one of them
13:08
because there was so much hype and so much hush and hundreds of
13:12
millions of dollars raised a. Lot of people don't remember
13:14
what Magic Leap was but you will remember in the video the whale
13:18
jumping in the gymnasium where the kids were all reacted to.
13:21
Yeah, on the hardwood floors and splashes in.
13:23
Super expensive I think just way too early.
13:27
We're still barely there. What AR products have been
13:29
successful so far? The Oculus.
13:31
Is the new meta success. That's what I mean.
13:34
It's sold a lot of units. Yeah, people seem to use it.
13:36
That's. The one that I've looked at that
13:37
I kind of, yeah, sees people using that.
13:39
The problem with all of those for me is the screen.
13:41
Is it like an inch away from your eyeball?
13:43
And so you're very, very close to focus straining.
13:45
To me, that's just super fatiguing.
13:47
None of those have hit yet, and Magic Leap was, I don't know,
13:50
like 5X10X20X farther ahead. There were an awful lot of lies.
13:54
There was an awful lot of stretching.
13:56
The stretching the truth, at least.
13:57
Yeah, the CEO claimed he invented a photonic light field
14:01
chip that would bypass screens and project light directly into
14:04
the eye. Digital objects
14:05
indistinguishable from reality under retina.
14:07
Yeah. Yeah.
14:07
That was how you got the whales crashing into the gym floor, of
14:11
course, and all the kids reacting.
14:12
The kids were reacting to nothing in the actual making of
14:15
it. They had not made this product,
14:17
and they simply went to a special effects house.
14:19
The people who did Lord of the Rings special effects to make
14:21
the actual whale crashing into the floor.
14:23
Yeah, this. Was a place that was valued at
14:25
single digit or double digit billions of dollars.
14:27
So I'm gonna miss. But we have other more
14:29
simplistic digital devices too that I would say were delivered
14:32
certainly, but came way short of the mod.
14:34
For sure. The Sony.
14:34
A digital Walkman. The Apple.
14:36
Newton. Microsoft.
14:37
Zune I mean the Newton, it's unfair to call it a precursor to
14:40
the iPhone, but it was kind of a precursor to the iPhone, right?
14:43
Or the Palm and it just swinging a miss.
14:45
I used Palm Pilots, which I think we're somewhat.
14:47
Palm Pilots were pretty good. Akin to Yes, we're akin to the
14:50
apple. Newton I mean, I would argue as
14:51
in some ways the successor, not in that it came after, but that
14:54
it was the one that one of that vintage.
14:57
It's still awkward to use. It was the least awkward of the
14:59
bunch, though. Yes, it was awkward, but it was
15:01
the least awkward, I think. Yeah, having owned a bunch of
15:03
Windows Mobile stuff before that that I thought was not great.
15:06
It was OK, but not great. That's funny because I owned a
15:08
bunch of Windows CE stuff. But that was before that.
15:11
I thought it was great. I mean I we actually used it and
15:14
loved. It the early CE stuff was great
15:16
there because, but the CE stuff, a lot of it was still like like
15:19
quasi computer form, right, like clam shows.
15:22
A laptop that weighed nothing a little.
15:23
Keyboard yeah, those were great. I was wondering when they went
15:26
over to mobile and they tried to do like the I mate the slide
15:28
screen and the and you had like non capacitive touch but
15:32
pressure touch with a little little pencil.
15:34
It was OK. It just they hadn't figured it
15:36
out yet. It wasn't great.
15:37
The Zune I thought was a really great device.
15:39
Like it was a good the hardware was good.
15:40
The software interface was good. Google has some stuff in this
15:43
bucket too where like Google Plus that was released and used.
15:48
They then pulled the plug on it. Later it was all developers.
15:51
I was on it. Yeah, I was mainly nervous it.
15:53
Was really, really good community.
15:55
Of developers and this is where. Really, we were all bound when
15:58
they pulled the plug on it because it was a really useful
16:00
community, a great knowledge base, but not for anything
16:03
except development. Not vaporware.
16:04
They did come out exactly actually, and I give.
16:07
You a lot of credit for pulling the plug on stuff.
16:08
You know they pull plugs on on products that I like and then I
16:11
wish would still exist. It's focus and I think at some
16:13
point for them to be like, yeah, we're just this isn't in, but
16:17
our strategy is now and we're going to decom it.
16:18
I think that's the right thing. Put the link in the show notes
16:20
for the Google graveyard. Oh yeah, just a.
16:23
List of everything. It's way bigger than you think.
16:25
However big you think this list is, it's like 3 times as long.
16:28
Now let's. Get to the part of the show that
16:29
everyone came to. Oh.
16:30
Yeah, yeah, yeah. The part we say goodbye.
16:31
The outright scams, yeah, The things that were the people,
16:35
People had no intention of making these products.
16:37
Yeah, they pitched a great product.
16:39
People believed what they said. It just was never to.
16:41
Be the one that a lot of people cite was Ovation, which was like
16:45
supposed to be like, I think like a Lotus productivity suite
16:48
sort of thing, right? And apparently these guys raised
16:50
a bunch of money on this, like they had screenshots and
16:54
something. They were like, look like we're
16:55
gonna build this thing and we're this.
16:56
Is this was like in 198224 there were dominant yeah, office
17:00
packages. And they raised like real money
17:02
in 1982 dollars and then two years later were bankrupt like
17:05
they had apparently nothing and like.
17:07
Lavish lifestyles. They didn't ever produce a
17:09
product. It was.
17:10
I mean, it was like. It was crazy.
17:12
I think a Ponzi scheme has more opportunity and upside than this
17:15
thing did. Yeah, I don't think there was
17:17
really ever much code even. No, they had great
17:19
demonstrations. They had great renderings of
17:21
what they were making. The pitch was fantastic.
17:24
Literally is where we get the term vapor.
17:26
Vaporware like these guys like. I think that is the.
17:28
That's the beginning, that. Yeah.
17:29
That is the beginning where it's like, oh wait, this is a thing.
17:32
Esther Dyson I think called it vaporware.
17:34
She was the 1st. Person Oh really use that yeah.
17:36
Oh cool now we're not doing this is an inclusive list
17:39
chronologically right. I think just one big ones that
17:42
that stand out there have certainly been a lot along the
17:44
way. That's a particularly big.
17:46
One, that's a pretty big one. Then you have around like, I
17:49
wouldn't say the dawn of the Internet boom, but on the the
17:52
backside of that. Early 2000s.
17:54
Yeah, early 2000s, you had Phantom, the Phantom console,
17:57
right? From Phantom Entertainment.
17:59
Yeah. And this was, if I recall
18:00
correctly, the first sort of connected gaming console where
18:04
it was just supposed to be a console that you plug in the
18:06
Internet and you get all of your gaming content.
18:09
And then later, you know, Media Center stuff and Internet TV and
18:11
all that. But it really started as a
18:13
gaming device. I.
18:14
Think it was. The idea was that it was
18:15
streaming. You were streaming your games.
18:17
You weren't playing your games locally, so you could play
18:19
anything, including any future. Games and that appears to have
18:22
been 100% vapor. And these guys raised real
18:25
money, right. I mean, these guys raised 10s of
18:27
millions of dollars. And somewhere along the way, I
18:31
remember reading a like a through through the the
18:34
bankruptcy proceedings or, or one of their shareholder
18:36
lawsuits, like where all the money went and most of it went
18:38
to marketing, which is never a good sign.
18:40
Sure, sure, sure. I think the next biggest asset
18:42
category was salaries. And then the the third was
18:46
development. You're like, well, yeah, yeah,
18:48
that's probably not gonna end well.
18:50
Also amusing to me that before this thing really imploded, I
18:54
guess when it was popular and people were like, Oh yeah,
18:56
they're making this thing. There was a an investigative
18:59
reporter from like some like computer news website that
19:01
published a letter critical of the the company and their
19:05
founder and basically said, I don't believe this is
19:08
legitimate. This is a couple years after
19:09
they launched. He got sued by Phantom.
19:12
They changed the name of this point to Infinium Labs but he
19:14
got sued by them and then the journalist countersued him, won
19:18
a court order demanding their their financials, the financials
19:22
of the company and the founder basically saying hey.
19:24
Show me what you're spending. On you show me this and I'll
19:27
I'll walk it back. They of course did not So they
19:29
did not provide any financials at all and had to settle with
19:32
him out of court for like I what I believe is is like 50 grand
19:35
some number. So they were willing to pay 50
19:37
grand to keep the to keep the ruse going, which I thought was.
19:40
If I remember right, they would buy the biggest booths at the
19:43
trade shows. Almost expensive.
19:45
Yeah, booths. And they had these boxes they
19:47
were actually pretending was the hardware.
19:49
Yeah, but the games were actually being played on
19:51
state-of-the-art big he sees that were hidden below in view.
19:55
Yes, the boxes that they were showing you were just empty
19:58
plastic shells. Sure, they would pretend that
20:00
those boxes were actually were how you were seeing the game.
20:02
Wow, I didn't know that. That's that's pretty, pretty
20:05
terrible. That's vaporware.
20:06
Anyway, big surprise that that founder went to prison.
20:10
No one here is shocked. He might have had multiple,
20:13
multiple scams and yeah. If you look him up, this is not
20:16
his first dance with the law, let's just put it that way.
20:18
He seems to be a serial offender, serial serial
20:22
fraudster. Theranos is a is another big
20:24
one, not another. Big one.
20:25
Come on. Elizabeth Holmes claimed that
20:28
with a single drop of blood, she could tell you, yes, everything
20:30
that you could ever know from any amount of blood tests.
20:32
And if you've ever had blood tests even recently, yeah,
20:34
they're drawing like 3 or 4 giant vials of blood so they can
20:38
do all this testing on you. And she was saying from a single
20:40
drop of blood, I can get the exact same information.
20:42
And of course it was. Never true.
20:44
The idea is great and I want to believe, I really want to
20:48
believe that that's doable. Her pitch was I, I have magic
20:51
that can do this at this much, much smaller scale.
20:53
And she fooled a lot of people. You had a whole bunch of people
20:56
that were like, I don't believe you, But until you show me, I
20:59
just sort of have no choice but to believe you.
21:01
Like, OK. Yeah.
21:02
I was like, really? I don't know.
21:03
There was just, like some hand waving and, well, it's nuts to
21:06
me. Well, they raised something like
21:07
$900 million, right? Like, they raised the mountain
21:09
of money from platinum plated institutional investors.
21:12
And apparently no one did their diligence.
21:15
Everyone was just like, oh, well, if those guys wrote a
21:16
check, then clearly it must be fine.
21:18
Like, how do you not do a modicum of diligence here,
21:20
George? Shultz, the Secretary of State
21:23
on the board of directors, just believed her.
21:25
Now, she would dress up like kind of like Steve Jobs.
21:26
She would wear these black turtlenecks for sure.
21:28
She had her voice sounding really weird.
21:30
So she she had kind of this mystique thing going on.
21:33
And she would tell you she had this technology that they
21:35
plainly did not have. Yes, this was doing medical
21:38
testing. That's the worst part of it.
21:39
They had people's lives in their hands when you needed real
21:42
testing, I mean, and you weren't getting real testing.
21:44
That's a big part of the difference here.
21:45
This isn't dudes making video game consoles fake.
21:49
Like you're talking about people's lives here, which is a
21:51
whole nother ball of wax, so that that one certainly hits.
21:55
Different all of this. Fake it till you make it.
21:56
Stuff it all is a bad idea. Do not commit fraud.
21:59
Admit. Yeah, of course.
22:01
Be honest where you are. Yeah, I agree with that.
22:03
From the simplest scam to the to the most complex, don't make the
22:06
Max smile until you can actually make the Max smile.
22:08
Once you can, great, show it off.
22:10
Be have fun and go crazy, but don't pretend in your
22:12
presentation. Like how do this is going to end
22:14
always always. Like if you're if you're making
22:15
up these stories about blood. Tests.
22:17
I think she thought she would eventually get it and then she'd
22:20
be fine. But at some point, aren't you
22:21
like, well, yeah, we're 2DB in the hole, this isn't working.
22:24
Like at some point would you come up for air?
22:25
She didn't want to backtrack on the lies she'd already told of
22:28
things that she claimed were working dug the hole.
22:30
I've already dug the hole. Yeah, yeah, I get it.
22:32
All right, let's let's wrap this up.
22:33
Let's talk about the causes of vaporware, the causes of either
22:37
intentional or unintentional vaporware.
22:39
I think some vaporware of course is not intentional.
22:41
I think that man, I'm going to say something I'm probably
22:43
regret. It seems like the majority of it
22:46
is not intentional, but of. Course, of course, a lot of it's
22:49
just not outright fraud. They just don't figure out how
22:51
to do what they. Want not alright, fraud.
22:53
Yeah, but but like you not knowing what you don't know is
22:57
kind of intentional, you know what I mean?
22:58
Yeah. So I don't know.
22:59
I don't, I don't wanna I don't wanna go leave them or or
23:02
relieve them of, of responsibility on some of these
23:04
things. I think a lot of these ones we
23:06
talked about here are typically from from what I'll call
23:09
deferred engineering and just being like, oh, we'll just
23:11
figure this out later, which a lot of us can do and can do
23:14
well. But I really think you have to
23:15
understand the difference between what are the unknowns
23:17
that you know about and what are the unknowns that you don't.
23:19
And if there's a lot of unknown unknowns, you're really hoes.
23:22
And what? Are the possible ability that
23:23
you are ever able to know. See all of those?
23:25
Exactly. You do have to like assign
23:27
probability to one of these things and say, are we ever
23:29
going to be able to solve this problem?
23:31
Yeah, Exactly how do you think we can tell when a product is?
23:34
Vaporware. Well, if it's released by a
23:35
company called Theranos, then you know it's vaporware.
23:37
That's one way. That's it.
23:38
Well. It's a the name of the company.
23:39
Not the only way, but it is a way that you can tell.
23:42
There's all sorts of things you can tell vague descriptions,
23:44
vague demos, right. If no one's willing to to
23:47
explain how it works. That's my favorite question is
23:49
when I see something and I'm like, that makes no sense to me,
23:51
How does it work? Yeah, and I get hand waving or
23:53
my favorite is someone's like, well, I can't tell you.
23:55
And I'm like, well, then it doesn't exist.
23:56
What do you mean you can't tell me, right?
23:58
Are you falling under trade secret here?
23:59
What? What?
24:00
What is so special? Like, give me a screwdriver.
24:01
I'll figure it out myself. Everybody falls under trade
24:03
secrets when they're lying. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
24:05
I always say it's a trade secret and then you start.
24:07
Getting the people like, it's all like protection, it's all
24:08
information control. And I'm just like, well, I just
24:10
don't believe in your product. Yeah, like I don't believe in it
24:12
at all. So that to me is 1.
24:13
Obviously, you see with a lot of these things, like very slippery
24:17
and I'll say like emotionally charged timelines where you're
24:20
just blaming a bunch of stuff on other folks, right.
24:22
Well, sure, once this is Donner who didn't have this or like I
24:25
love they did this with the T1. The T1 was like, well, you know,
24:28
we're delayed because of the government shutdown.
24:30
And it's like what part of the government shutdown affected
24:32
the. Government shutdown had nothing
24:34
to do with your phone. Like, if you were prepared for
24:36
this question, you would say, well, we already had it
24:37
submitted to the FCC and they, you know, were delayed, but you
24:40
didn't have it submitted to the FCC.
24:41
You just, right are trying to just point at something else.
24:44
So that's always a good sign. I think ones that are always the
24:46
hype machine where there's never bad news ever.
24:49
Every single product design. Yeah.
24:51
Implementation I'm a part of. Yeah, you break stuff, you fail.
24:53
You screw up, you make missteps. Bernie Madoff never had a down.
24:56
Year never had a down year, right?
24:57
Wasn't like, oh, how does that work?
24:59
Maybe this year I should show a little bit of a dip just to
25:01
Nope, I'm always doing great. So I think that's a good
25:04
example. You mentioned this earlier too,
25:06
just trying to shove too much stuff into the bag, just trying
25:08
to do too much, right? Like why are you trying to do
25:10
all of these things? And maybe that that fits more in
25:12
the, the wider scope or like, OK, you're claiming you're going
25:15
to do 20 things and that's amazing.
25:17
Do 2 of the 21st, Yeah, demonstrate that and then go
25:20
bolt on the next four and the next. 6 Show me some progress.
25:23
Show me something. But then you're like, well, no,
25:25
it all has to be done together. And you're like, OK, that sounds
25:27
like a little bit of hyperbole. Anything else?
25:30
The one other thing too that I, I noticed is a lot of these
25:32
products will focus on these small edge cases, hoping that
25:36
you as the, as the observer will then infer that, well, if they
25:39
can do that, it must do all of this other stuff.
25:41
It's like, yeah, wait, show me you do those core use cases
25:44
first. Great if you're getting the edge
25:45
cases as well, right? But your lead should be the core
25:47
use cases. Don't make me infer that
25:49
actually tell me that these little things that I think are
25:51
real telltale we're like your brain is filling in the gaps.
25:54
Well, if they can do that, they must be able to do these other
25:57
things. It's like, no, sure, no, let's
25:59
validate that first. All right, we have to get out of
26:01
here, but quickly before we do, have you seen or read anything
26:03
good this last week? Given this episode and and
26:05
vaporware and talking about like the inventors behind them,
26:08
because I think a lot of vaporware is is intricately
26:10
coupled with the inventor. Sure, I have to recommend what I
26:14
think of as one of the best engineering and inventor movies
26:17
really of all time. It's certainly OK, help shape me
26:19
into you know what I am OK, so I want you to guess.
26:21
I'm pretty sure you can get this, but I want you to guess
26:22
I'm gonna recommend. OK, I'm gonna give you a hint.
26:24
An uptight teenage prodigy enters a top engineering
26:27
college. Yeah, but feels awkward among
26:29
the freewheeling students. When a professor aims to turn
26:32
their laser project into a military weapon, he and his
26:34
offbeat roommate plot to ruin the plan.
26:37
You know to. This I have no idea.
26:38
Oh, I love this film. Sneakers.
26:39
No, Sneakers was one of the ones I wanted to use here, but it
26:43
didn't really fit. You're in the right genre.
26:45
You're off by about a decade or so.
26:47
Real genius. Oh, OK, All right, 19. 85's real
26:49
genius. So this is directed by Martha
26:51
Coolidge. Starred Val Kilmer Uh huh.
26:53
It was set on the campus of Pacific Tech, right, a science
26:56
and engineering university similar to.
26:58
Caltech. Caltech.
26:59
Real Genius has provided certainly me and my fellow nerds
27:02
that grew up in the 80s with countless arcane nerd references
27:05
and quotable material for decades.
27:07
I make Laszlo Hollyfield references at least once a month
27:10
that nobody ever gets. And one of my favorites.
27:12
Awesome. That felt fitting for vaporware
27:15
because they kind of turned that project into vaporware.
27:17
Yeah, I appreciate. That that's cool they made it
27:18
vaporware even though it worked anyway.
27:20
How about you? Mine actually is a documentary
27:21
about vaporware. It is the 2019 documentary The
27:24
Inventor Out for Blood in Silicon Valley.
27:26
It's the film about the haunting disconnect between Elizabeth
27:29
Holmes meticulously crafted public persona, her Black Steve
27:32
job, turtlenecks and unblinking gaze, and the tiled world of her
27:36
labs where technology she touted simply failed to exist.
27:39
The film is full of never before seen footage of Holmes visionary
27:42
proclamations, juxtaposing them with the gritty reality of the
27:46
whistleblowers who risked everything to reveal that the
27:48
machine, the Edison, was a hollow shell while Silicon
27:51
Valley thrives on making it. Till you make it.
27:54
Don't do that, Please don't do that.
27:55
Their nose crossed a lethal line by deploying fake data to real
27:59
patients. Terrible.
28:00
It's a chilling psychological profile of a founder who became
28:03
a zealot of her own lie, surrounding herself with aging
28:05
Titans of the industry who were so blinded by her story that
28:08
they never bothered to ask for the data.
28:10
The inventor out for Blood in Silicon Valley on HBO Max now.
28:14
I still haven't seen this, I have to go watch.
28:16
This that is the episode. Thank you for joining us for all
28:18
this nonsense. It's really terrible podcast
28:20
from the awful company. This is on the web at Nonsense
28:22
dot Production. I'm Sujila.
28:23
I'm Jeff Parker. If you like this program, please
28:25
follow, download, subscribe and like at Apple Podcast, YouTube
28:27
Music, Amazon Music, Antenna Pod, iHeartRadio, Spotify, My
28:31
Favorite Overcast wherever you may get your podcast.
28:33
From Nonsense uses LibreOffice, a powerful, free and open source
28:36
office suite that offers professional word processing,
28:38
dynamic spreadsheets, stunning presentations, and more.
28:42
Plus, it didn't cost $8 million that it raised from investors
28:45
when it was making nothing. It's fully compatible with
28:47
Microsoft Office format, so collaboration is seamless.
28:50
LibreOffice is cross-platform, private, and continually
28:52
approved by a worldwide community.
28:54
Create, share and innovate without limits.
28:56
Try the amazing Libra office today.
28:58
I use a lot of Libra Ovation. Exactly.
29:00
Be a better product. Now we'll be every Tuesday and
29:01
Thursday mornings. For more nonsense, please join
29:03
us. Oh my word, I can't believe I
29:17
didn't get real genius.