Mastering The Hype Cycle

There has been much commentary this week in response to what the Wall Street Journal has called ‘Larry Elison’s rant’-  that cloud computing is a hyped term for the stuff we have all been doing anyway.  There is of course some truth to that.  ‘We’ – the whole IT industry – have been gradually building [...]

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Hype Cycles arise when a new idea, concept, technology or innovation arises and is introduced to a social group – most commonly for our purpose some sort of marketplace.  They are usually single cycles and then they stop. But sometimes long repeated waves – like economic cycles – can look the same for a while, [...]

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No – because retail is a very broad and ongoing activity area. You might see a repeated multi-year up-down business cycle in retail and you will see seasonal cycles but these are not hype cycles.   Yet, with just couple of bounding constraints on this vast business domain we might uncover newer and more innovative business [...]

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At a recent IBM-organized panel on collective intelligence, the moderator asked whether ideas such as crowdsourcing and peer production were just a fad. As she asked the question, she observed that she was having a hard time coming up with examples of technology fads, as most ended up having some degree of staying power in the [...]

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In the book we show just how closely aspects of the dot com boom/bust followed the Hype Cycle.   Given where we stand today in the middle of the credit crunch – it is worth asking about the ‘innovation’ at its epicenter- the CDO (collateralized debt obligation). I’m an IT industry analyst, I know nothing of [...]

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You could not fail to notice all the hype this year – with CNBC and the WSJ running special features on the subject of green business.  As far back as April 2007,  mainstream business magazine ‘Fortune’ put California Governer Schwarznegger on its front cover with the headline ‘cut the gas or else’ and an internal [...]

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One of the questions we regularly get asked about the Hype Cycle is whether things can sometimes fall off or die in the trough of disillusionment. The answer is yes. It is not very common but it does happen. Indeed for Gartner published hype cycles we even have a chart symbol denoting things we predict [...]

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We are starting to get some early reviews for the book. Brian P. Watson at CIO Insight has selected  it for their Fall reading list John Teresko at Industry Week has picked out the STREET model in its review Vinnie Mirchandani at Deal Architect has a mini Q&A with Jackie Our thanks to each of [...]

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We’re always interested to see the variety of topics where people see the hype cycle taking effect. Outside of information technology, where the whole thing started, we’ve seen examples in bio-science from Pedro Beltrão: and Clean Tech by Joshua Reynolds: Some have even extended it waaaay outside the realm of science and technology: Goes to [...]

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I recently stumbled on a BusinessWeek article from May 2008 with the great title “Bluetooth Comes of Age.” This is a classic example of news sentiment giving you a little indicator of the status of a technology. Here’s an international business magazine suggesting the technology is now prime time – on the plateau of productivity. [...]

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