Hype springs eternal
1 min read
One thing of which you can be certain in the electronics industry is hype. It is an industry which has been driven, since its earliest days, by smoke, mirrors and elevated – sometimes unattainable – levels of expectation. And that's just electronics technology; the whole level of expectation gets racheted up when the technology is packaged into consumer products.
Hype evidences itself in a number of ways; for example, the good old 'vapour ware' approach; all talk and no action. But today, it's more about pre launch excitement and post launch disappointment.
Market researcher Gartner seems to have the measure of this with its Hype Cycle approach. It has been using the Hype Cycle since 1995 in order to highlight what it says is a 'common pattern of overenthusiasm, disillusionment and eventual realism that accompanies each new technology and innovation'.
What the approach does is to track technologies and map them to their appropriate place in the Hype Cycle. This year's review encompasses 1900 technologies, grouped into 76 Hype Cycles.
It's interesting to track some technologies. In 2006, for example, Web 2.0 was firmly at the peak of inflated expectations; by 2009, it had reached the trough of disillusionment. Sensor mesh networks, by contrast, were in the trough of disillusionment in 2006 but, effectively, moved upstream and the technology is now nearer the area of inflated expectations, with implementation not anticipated for at least 10 years.
What's in the latest Emerging Technologies Hype Cycle report? Inflated expectations are seen for internet tv, NFC payments, cloud computing and wireless power. In the trough of disillusionment are cloud/web platforms, virtual worlds and hosted virtual desktops.
Many things have been branded tomorrow's technology; the problem is that some always will be. Hype springs eternal, as they might say.
