Erica Gierke '06
Faculty advisor: Stephen J. Schmidt, economics
The Vaporware Game
Are tech companies playing games with the market? That's what Erica Gierke wants to know, and she spent countless hours analyzing data, news releases and other information to get an overview of the problem of vaporware.
The term vaporware refers to software, hardware and all those other products that are as thin as air-products that have been designed, developed, demo-ed and hyped but that tend to evaporate as their release dates approach.
“When a company announces a product that's still under development, they're marketing something that doesn't exist,” Gierke says. “This is very common in the technology market, especially in software, but also in hardware and with video games.”
Over-promising and under-delivering is more than a nuisance for consumers, Gierke says. “It can be considered a marketing tactic to deter competition and a manipulation of the market. If companies are using a lot of vaporware and pushing others out of the market, they are artificially creating a monopoly for themselves. It forces out the competition before the product is ready to go.”
A computer science and economics interdepartmental major who is head of the USTAR Tech Team (which assists with IT), Gierke says her research is particularly engaging because it combines her dual major.
“In computer science, we learn about strategies and formulas for product development, like software engineering, in which we go through the entire product's life cycle,” she says. “I'm also interested in looking at the business end of it. As a business marketing tactic, vaporware is fairly new.”