English

Noun

shelfware ‎(plural shelfwares)

1. (software) A piece of software that has never been used at all since its creation.
2. A piece of software created for the sole purpose of being immediately shelved.
3. Software purchased but not used.

Quotations

• 2006 Chapman, Merrill R., In search of stupidity: over 20 years of high-tech marketing disasters (2nd Edition), Apress, page 277-8

  Purchasers of these software products soon began to derisively refer to them as shelfware. This unflattering designation arose from the fact that once a company bought one of these mega-sized, multi-module pieces of code and attempted to implement part of it, the expense, difficulty, and cost of doing so often led to the rest of the product being shoved on a shelf and buried.

• 1994 Silver, L and Marin, I : "Software Use and Disuse: From Shelfware to Improved Software Utilization" in Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting Proceedings, Special Sessions , pp. 975-975(1)

  All too often, software that has been purchased is not used. A term has emerged to describe this phenomenon, "shelfware."