gartner’s “hype cycle”
fiften years ago gartner introduced their “hype cycle” as a commentary on the human response to technology. the hype cycle provides a snapshot of the position of technologies relative to a market, region, or industry vertical. the tool that gartner created is used to identify which technologies are hyped and which are suffering from disillusionment. it also identifies which are stable enough to allow for a reasonable rate of adoption and developing an understanding of when to use them.
it’s interesting to note some of the technologies and their associated “hype cycles” that gartner was observing below in 1995.
wireless communications have exploded into hundreds of underlying technologies, standards, and applications. today, there is an “app” for almost everything you could possibly dream up. the information super-highway has spawned freeways, back alleys, and express lanes to drive information access, create new forms of communities, and the blue chip companies of today. speech and handwriting recognition are now just beginning to achieve adoption through the advent of swype for text input and bing’s voice recognition application.
it’s interesting to see how “forward thinking” the smart folks at garner are. i would love to see where things like social media, augmented reality, crowd sourcing, social tv, and mobile payments register on their hype cycle today.
