Wired News' 8th Annual Vaporware Awards

In Vaporware Phantom Haunts Us All, Wired News' Leander Kahney provides a great roundup of 2004's vaporware – technology products that were announced but not delivered. Some Mac fans will no doubt chafe that Apple was on the list this year for the 3GHz G5, which was promised to arrive in the summer and still has yet to be unveiled. But no one should be making promises they can't keep; Apple included.

Notable to me was the inclusion of TiVoToGo, which was announced by TiVo in January 2004 and continually promised to us TiVo users as "coming soon." As late as December, the company said the service would be available at the end of the year. Well, the end of the year came and went with nary a peep. But on Jan. 3, 2005, TiVo sent press releases to the Associated Press and other media that they had released TiVoToGo. Yay! Wait, where is it?

We have the necessary setup: A Series2 TiVo connected to our home network and the Home Media Option enabled. Yet we received no messages through the box nor via e-mail. Visiting their web site, I finally found reference to it. Apparently you have to download a new version of their TiVo Desktop software application ... which is for Windows only. Well, I have Virtual PC 7 on our G5 iMac with Windows XP Pro, so I figured I'd just do it that way. Yet when I installed the software, it did not find our TiVo on the network. Huh? Oh, apparently our TiVo's system software needs to be upgraded to handle the new feature. According to the web site, the only way that will happen is if you fill out a form on their site requesting the new software. Then you have to wait a few weeks for them to give it to you.

Is it technically released if no one can use it?

And their statement that they're working on a Mac version sounds a little false to me since they promised to support the AAC file format in their Music-streaming feature more than a year ago and haven't delivered on that promise either.