The INQUIRER top five products that never made it to release

I COULDN'T believe it when Fernando 'outside a chip shop in Walthamstow' Cassia wrote in today's INQ that the Foleo was no more. I liked the sound of the product for writing on trains criss-crossing London's red and tranquil labyrinth despite in full and certain knowledge that the Tube won't be working at the other end. Surely a subject for Fernando's compatriot, the great writer Jorge Luis Borges. If he weren't dead.

Not sure if the Foleo wasn't the biggest product ever to be pulled before it had even been pushed out but it certainly wasn't the first ballyhooed Next Big Thing never to reach store shelves. Of course, lots of products spend years in vapour but usually they make it out the door in the end. Here are five that didn't.

5. WinFS. Microsoft's object-oriented file system was supposed to arrive in Longhorn but got pulled way before release after having spent lots of time on spec sheets and, presumably, under development. To be fair, it wasn't a product but a feature, albeit a huge one. On a lesser scale, Microsoft has a long record of pulling features, key aspects of the Viridian virtualisation hypervisor being just the latest in a catalogue of extractions designed to let dev teams hit deadlines and override pesky programming issues.

4. AIX and Solaris on Itanium. AIX was at one point down to have Itanium kernel support but that feature didn't make it all the way to release. Sun boss Jonathan Schwartz also told readers of his blog to stand by for news of a possible port for Solaris but we're still waiting. What, no Itanium support? We can think of a few million reasons why not.

3. Compaq's Clipper. Big Q had a plan for a Net PC for the home. It had the mock-up and photographs of the mock-up but this futuristic, diskless mini PC that was going to run the BeOS never got past the marketing BS stage.

2. Bandai Pippin. This box, based on a sliver of Mac OS and packing a Power chip, was meant to be a cheap home computer at a time in the mid-90s when cheap computers were few. By the time it made it out of the vapour, it looked a lot like a dead duck. OK, hard-core Applers, this one did make it to market but only briefly, only in a couple of markets, and only in quantities aligned the number of teeth my only hen possesses.

1. AOL's free PC. Back when AOL was hot and the Netscape alliance seemed a good deal, it floated the ides of giving away free PCs for subscribers. Today the idea's coming back for broadband deals. Right idea, wrong time. µ