There seems to be a growing trend amongst manufacturers to announce products well in advance of their projected release dates. 'Vapourware' — something that is on the way, but has yet to actually materialise in the marketplace — has long been one of the more annoying features of the software world, but hardware manufacturers seem to be picking up bad habits too. The results of premature product announcements are bad for everybody.

In the short term, potential customers — those who are not too cynical, that is — will become excited at the prospect of product X, which promises to surpass the competition in all respects, yet costs no more. In the expectation of being able to buy product X in six months time, these customers aren't about to pop into their local music store and buy a competing product, and so without even appearing on the market, product X damages everybody else's business, manufacturers and retailers alike.

This might be considered fair enough — manufacturers are in competition with one another, after all — but when products appear late, or don't do everything that they were supposed to, which especially in the software world is all too often the case, then customers will become cynical and disillusioned. Initially this will manifest itself as a loss of faith in a particular manufacturer's ability to actually deliver on their promises, and indirectly therefore in their actual products — a very immediate reason for not announcing products before they're actually ready to go — but in the longer term people will lose faith in the whole industry that insists on wildly optimistic projections of product launch dates and, again, everybody suffers. There may be some valid reasons for announcing products well ahead of time, but it seems clear that on balance the cons outweigh the pros overwhelmingly.

On an altogether lighter note, you may have noticed that one of the competitions in this issue has as its prize a device that not is not only devoid of MIDI sockets, but which doesn't even possess a single flashing light, LCD display, or inc/dec button. It has six strings, it's made of wood and, if you didn't already know, it's a guitar (rather a nice one, needless to say). This doesn't herald a new direction for SOS — we're not about to start reviewing guitars and amps — but seeing as how our readership survey last year revealed that 47% of you play guitar, we thought that you'd appreciate the chance to win a Gibson Les Paul Standard. Good luck, people.