Unravelling the Hype Cycle

It’s no secret that IT companies talk up their products and technologies. Let’s stop mincing words; many are hype merchants.

In fact, IT firms often go a lot further. They hire professional public relations consultants and advertising agencies to whip-up excitement on their behalf.

Sometimes they can convince people in the media to follow suit and enthuse about their new gizmos or ideas.

Occasionally the media’s constant search for hot news and interesting headlines can lead to overenthusiastic praise or a journalist gullibly swallowing a trumped-up storyline.

None of this will be news to anyone working in the business. However, what you may not know is that the IT industry’s predilection for shameless self promotion has now been formally recognised and enshrined in one of the most powerful conceptual tools for understanding IT markets: Gartner’s Hype Cycle.

About a decade ago, some Gartner analysts noticed a pattern in the way the world (and the media) viewed most new technologies. This can be summarised as a huge initial burst of excitement rapidly followed by a sigh of disillusion and, eventually, a more balanced approach.

Over time this observation evolved into the Hype Cycle, which is usually represented graphically (see diagram). Time is measured along the horizontal axis, while visibility is shown on the vertical axis.

The Hype Cycle has five distinct phases.

The first phase, Garter calls it “technology trigger”, happens when a product launch, engineering breakthrough or some other event generates an enormous amount of publicity. At first the new idea is exposed to a narrow audience, often through the specialist press, and people start thinking about its possibilities. Things snowball, before long the idea permeates to a wider audience and the mainstream media starts to pay attention.

Pretty soon this interest gets out of control until things reach the second phase, which Gartner calls “the peak of inflated expectations”. At this point the mainstream media becomes obsessed – you can expect to see muddle-headed but enthusiastic TV segments about the technology. You know things have peaked for sure when current affairs TV shows and radio presenters pay attention.

At this point people typically start to have unrealistic expectations. While there may be successful applications of the technology, there are often many more failures behind the scenes.

Once these disappointments become public, the Hype Cycle shifts into what Gartner poetically calls the “trough of disillusionment”. Most of the mainstream press will turn its back on the story, others will be critical. Sales may drop. The idea quickly falls out of favour and is tarred with the unfashionable brush.

Occasionally ideas and technologies sink beneath the waves at this point, but more often they re-emerge in the “slope of enlightenment”. This is where companies and users who persisted through the bad times come to a better understanding of the benefits on offer. As a rule of thumb, most of the media has lost interest and may even ignore things, the good stuff just happens quietly in the background.

Finally, the cycle reaches the “plateau of productivity”. This occurs when the benefits of the idea or technology are now widely understood and accepted. Things should be stable at this point. The plateau can be high or low depending on the nature of the product in question.

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