Comments on: What’s not a hype cycle – Ebbs, flows & pendulum swings

By: The FT suggests the Hype Cycle might apply hedge funds.

The FT suggests the Hype Cycle might apply hedge funds. — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 17:55:21 +0000

[...] the medium term (perhaps 5 to 10 years) this can sometimes be mistaken for a hype cycle. We have noted the difference before in this Blog. In the Hype Cycle two underlying curves create the shape: the social excitement bell curve plus [...]

By: Collaboration 2.0 mobile edition

Collaboration 2.0 mobile edition — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 07:47:46 +0000

[...] honorable exceptions. Long form blogging went through a ‘trough of disillusionment’ to use analyst Gartner’s bizarre term, after the initial flurry of excitement a few years ago. After the initial burst of [...]

By: Cycles, Waves and Multiple Peaks

Cycles, Waves and Multiple Peaks — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 16:36:46 +0000

[...] a recent response to a posting on this blog, Whit Andrews points out that the shape of the hype cycle is a wave, not a cycle, in that it [...]

By: Mark Raskino

Mark Raskino — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 10:24:01 +0000

Good point Whit and I know this observation can leave an imperfect rough edge to the tool in many people’s minds. Like – its useful but ‘you missed a bit’.

The Hype Cycle is not a truly closed and endless loop – agreed. Not like the water cycle. However, it is cast from the innovation adopter / buyer point of view and it is an ever repeating pattern of social behavior. Remember the Y axis is ‘expectations’ – the curve is representing people’s response to the technology, not the technology itself. It is not a market penetration curve or a measure of technical maturity. The pipeline of technology innovations is – for the practical scope of this management tool – ‘infinite’ and so it is actually ‘we’ who go round and round the same behaviour cycle.

Mark

By: Whit Andrews

Whit Andrews — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 00:04:38 +0000

Something that I have wrestled with over the years I have been here is that the hype cycle isn’t. It is, in fact, a hype wave (as you hint at in the post here). I’m not calling for a major rethink of the hype cycle itself, or, heaven forfend, its renaming. I am, though, of a mind that perhaps some notions really DO pass through a hype cycle, with new iterations each time. One might be “interactive video,” in which initial iterations might be Qube, or something like it, working through ITV and QuickTime on the Web and then Broadcast.com and now YouTube and tomorrow, I’m not sure. That’s a real CYCLE. What this kind of cycle would look like would be the wave you have here from the real estate industry, but closed into an ordinary loop, to become something elliptical or circular. If we came up a layer of abstraction, we could be more distantly predictive — and make it easier, it seems to me, for those newcomers to see the way the future might end up. (Over, and over, and over…)