coasterware
n. Software so bad or useless that it never gets installed.
Also Seen As
Examples
2003
In the gaming world, few things exemplify corporate greed as well as poorly made expansion packs. Europa Universalis: Crown of the North falls squarely into this category. From start to finish, it is a poorly conceived, ill-executed, and time-wasting piece of coasterware designed to suck money away from both fans of the much-lauded series and unsuspecting newcomers.
—Di Luo, “ Europa Universalis: Crown of the North,” Computer Gaming World, November 01, 2003
1998
Traveling further down the spiral, the visuals in Spawn set a new low for 32-bit graphics, with excessive clipping, poor textures and incomplete animations that advertise the rush job committed here. Throw in a sorry excuse for a soundtrack and you have a game that's table-coaster-ware. Bottom line: Send this back to hell.
—Tom Ham, “Screen Shots,” The Washington Post, January 23, 1998
1995 (earliest)
Its marketing plan has changed several times, and one analyst who is a SoftKey fan calls its products ''coasterware,'' because if you don't like the actual software you can use the CD-ROMs as drink coasters since they're so cheap.
—Herb Greenberg, “Does SoftKey International Have Some Hard Core Problems?,” The San Francisco Chronicle, October 25, 1995
Notes
"Of course, the emergence of Windows as a widely accepted and widely used operating environment on the PC is certainly not obvious right now. Although sales of Windows have been good, most of it is undoubtedly shelfware."
—Charles Petzold & Winn L. Rosch, “Four-figure video,” PC Magazine, May 26, 1987