Besides, they illustrate this wonderful quote from David Brooks's "Lord of the Meme" column in NYTimes: "In order to cement your status in the cultural elite, you want to be already sick of everything no one else has even heard of."
These graphs also provide good fodder for thinking about how media consumption would change if any of the pre-hype technologies reached mass adoption.
After catching the 2008 graph on Techcrunch a few days ago, I hit up Google image search for earlier versions. (You can also buy Gartner's original reports, but at close to $2,000 apiece they are beyond this blog's budget). Below is what I've found. You will see that some of the technologies don't make it into the later versions of the graph; I think it's because these are Garther's charts for different tech sectors. Click on images to zoom in.
If you have graphs for the missing years, please comment or drop me a line.
1995
2000
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
Sources: Dave Chaffey, this blog, Techcrunch, SAPDesignGuild, Gartner, Guardian
We are very pleased you find the Hype cycle so useful. Thanks for writing about it. Your supposition is correct - over the years since the first Hype Cycle (the 1995 one you show here) we have had to 'fork' it many times. We now publish about 60 annually, covering over 1000 technologies, innovations and management concepts.
ReplyDeleteSometimes things just fail - never reaching the plateau of productivity. Also - once they reach that stage, after a while we remove them from view. On other occasions things change name - or split into parts as they move through the cycle. A good example is the 'Application Service Provider' (ASP) term circa 2002 - nowadays called 'Software as a Service (Saas).
Best regards - Mark
Thank you for leaving a note, Mark.
ReplyDelete