The ultimate goal of any IT service package is to have a group of machines that are in keeping with corporate policy and help to boost productivity whilst minimising the amount of time employees have to wait for their tools to allow them to do their jobs.

This means choosing the right hardware for the task at hand, ensuring that staff are familiar enough with the tools or can through simple tutorials learn the tools intuitively, as well as ensuring that the only software on the system is the ones needed for the task at hand.

In other words, it is about avoiding tools such as SoftRAM, one of the most useless pieces of commercial software ever made that was so ineffective that it led to a lawsuit and a criminal investigation.

In 1995, Microsoft released Windows 95, a game-changing operating system that opened the doors of IT to an entire generation of office staff. It is difficult to truly capture how much office work changed when Windows 95 was widely adopted.

However, one problem that it had for businesses was that it had much greater technical requirements and specifications than previous DOS and Windows 3.1 computers did, which is where SoftRAM waltzed in as a potential solution.

The idea was that rather than spend hundreds of pounds on RAM, for around £60 SoftRAM could “double your memory” for far less.

There were two major complaints with the software. The first was that what the software actually did was available for free to people who knew and had the confidence to change system specifications. 

The much worse accusation, exposed by German computer magazine c’t, was that SoftRAM did not even do that much, leading to an investigation by the United States Federal Trade Commission, a mandated recall and ultimately bankruptcy.

It was the most extreme example of “placebo software”, or software that claims to do something it did not, although its well-publicised failure did lead to people spotting claims that were “too good to be true” more easily.