Industry publications widely accused companies of using early announcements intentionally to gain competitive advantage over others. In his 1989 "Network World" article, Joe Mohen wrote the practice had become a "vaporware epidemic", and blamed the press for not investigating claims by developers. "If the pharmaceutical industry were this careless, I could announce a cure for cancer today – to a believing press." In 1985 Stewart Alsop began publishing his influential monthly "Vaporlist", a list of companies he felt announced their products too early, hoping to dissuade them from the practice; among the entries in January 1988 were a Verbatim Corp. optical drive that was 30 months late, WordPerfect for Macintosh (12 months), IBM OS/2 1.1 (nine months), and Lotus 1-2-3 for OS/2 and Macintosh (nine and three months late, respectively). "Wired" Magazine began publishing a similar list in 1997. Seven major software developers—including Ashton-Tate, Hewlett-Packard and Sybase—formed a council in 1990, and issued a report condemning the "vacuous product announcement dubbed vaporware and other misrepresentations of product availability" because they felt it had hurt the industry's credibility.