Real Product or Extremely Good Slide

There is a specific nausea that sets in when you are reading an announcement and you genuinely cannot determine whether the thing they are describing exists.

Not "is it any good" — that's a later problem. Not "will it ship on time" — that assumes it's a thing that ships. The more foundational question: is this a product, or is this a mockup someone rendered in Figma and then a communications team wrote three paragraphs about?

The tells used to be clearer. Vaporware had that sheen — the frictionless UI, the suspiciously cooperative demo data, the spokesperson who somehow never got interrupted. Enterprise software had the opposite problem: so real it was ugly, so shipped it barely worked.

Now the middle has eaten everything. Every API is a "platform." Every internal prototype is a "preview for select Enterprise customers." Every capability someone could theoretically build on top of your SDK becomes, in the press release, a feature — fully formed, available, definitely a thing.

So you read the announcement twice. You check the docs. The docs link to a waitlist. The waitlist says "contact sales." Sales says "can you tell me more about your use case."

The product does not exist. The product has never existed. The product is a hypothesis about what Enterprise customers might pay for, expressed in the past tense.

This is fine. This is how it works now. I am simply noting it with the same calm I reserve for other geological processes I cannot control.