Shelf Ware

I just read the term "Shelfware" in the book The Cathedral and the Bazaar, by Eric S. Raymond. It is defined to be that shrink-wrapped software which is marketed well enough to sell, but quite worthless in practice.

If I had all the dollars that I spent on ShelfWare back, I would be: a) retired b) wealthy c) _________ (fill in) d) all of the above.

One good example occurred in the early 90's, the software to replace the Windows print manager and cause win 3.1 to print "blazingly fast". With a 386/16Mhz machine driving a 9-pin dot-matrix printer printing graphics, the speedup was not noticible. Lesson cost: $40.