The Gartner Group has released its list of technologies in the 2005 Hype Cycle, a model that “highlights the progression of an emerging technology from conception, to market over-enthusiasm, through a period of disillusionment, to an eventual understanding of the technology's relevance and role in a market or domain." According to the press release, Gartner's Hype Cycle Model follows five stages:
• Technology Trigger: A breakthrough, public demonstration, product launch or other event generates significant press and industry interest.
• Peak of Inflated Expectations: During this phase of over enthusiasm and unrealistic projections, a flurry of well-publicized activity by technology leaders results in some successes, but more failures, as the technology is pushed to its limits. The only companies making money are conference organizers and magazine publishers.
• Trough of Disillusionment: Because the technology does not live up to its over inflated expectations, it rapidly becomes unfashionable. Media interest wanes, except for a few cautionary tales.
• Slope of Enlightenment: Focused experimentation and solid hard work by an increasingly diverse range of organizations lead to a true understanding of the technology's applicability, risks and benefits. Commercial, off-the-shelf methodologies and tools ease the development process.
• Plateau of Productivity: The real-world benefits of the technology are demonstrated and accepted. Growing numbers of organizations feel comfortable with the reduced levels of risk, and the rapid growth phase of adoption begins.
Gartner divides this year’s hyped technologies are divided into three main themes:
Collaboration technologies, including Podcasting, peer-to-peer VOIP, desktop search, RSS, corporate blogging and wikis.
Next generation architecture, including service oriented architecture, Web services-enabled business models, extensible business reporting language and business process platforms.
Real World Web, including location-aware applications, passive RFID and mesh sensor networks.
Not all hyped technologies follow the model: videoconferencing, handwriting recognition and speech recognition are still climbing out of the trough of disillusionment (don’t you love these names?).
Meanwhile, Business 2.0 is running an article on what technologies venture capitalist would fund in a second. It’s got some business-to-business ideas, but most are for consumers.
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