Generally speaking the hype cycle is much better for tracking a generic market innovation (e.g. ‘mobile email’) rather than products or companies (e.g. ‘Blackberry’). However the hype cycle is a bit of a Swiss Army Knife – usually fairly useful when you don’t have the perfect tool for the job.
With that in mind I have been playing with public data about the Google Chrome browser to see if it helps evidence a hype cycle curve for that piece of software. I used Google Trends (search volume) as an indicator of social excitement and browser share as an indicator of market penetration and real progress. It seems to work fairly well. Remember – the Y axis of the cycle is ‘Expectations’ – there is no perfect measure for that so we must look for proxies and markers to build evidence. The Hype Cycle is, in the end, mostly a qualitative management tool for expert judgement.
However – here is the indicator curve I plotted from the data.
So what can we learn from the green line that combines the two factors? Chrome appears to have had a short sharp rise to the peak of inflated expectations – and a quick fall. We might expect that, because it’s only an incremental innovation (another browser) not a breakthrough, but Google is a major and closely followed company. Chrome didn’t spend long in the trough of disillusionment – barely 3 months. However it seems to be following a long slow crawl out of there – up a shallow slope of enlightenment.
I’ll try to revisit this in few months time, to see what happens next.
