How vaporware became software.

In the beginning every software is probably a vaporware 

This is a story from about 10 years ago.Back then I was working at a telecom startup , which at that point of time was still struggling to build anything of note.

I woke up to a phone call at about 6:00 A.M. It was our Chief Scientist calling. “Could you come to office in a hour? We have a very important demo in the evening.” Saying no was not really an option, so I turned up. And what transpired thereafter was amazing.

It was 7:00 AM by the time I reached office. There were four of us. By 8:00 a plan was made and a story was developed. By 9:00 we knew who will work on what. We got cracking.

By 5:00 in the evening we had finished building the screens of a product that did not exist. The only thing left was to tie together all the screens so as to convey a coherent story. A few hours of work and we were done.

The demo started at round 9:00 P.M. The client was shown a product that was capable enough of solving their business problems. That fact was there was no product at all. It was vaporware!

What happened afterwards?

The client bought the idea. We spent the next 3 months building the actual product and then installing it on client side. The success of this product well and truly established the company. At it’s height this 15 person startup grew to employ about 500 people.

And this makes me wonder. Do all products start from being a vaporware until the first fool is found who thinks it to be software?