The Technology Hype Cycle

jira writes "What does it take for a new gadget to be succesfull on the market? Which technologies will become part of everyday life in the future? BBC investigates the Techology Hype Cycle."

Comments

90% marketing

[Megaweapon]

The usefulness of a gadget is irrelavent as long as the public buys them. Some tennis shoes are still over $100, right?

Re:90% marketing

[sg3000]

It's more than marketing. If it were just marketing, we wouldn't have grocery stores any longer; we'd all be using that home delivery service that Whoopi Goldberg was plugging to pay $10 for a six pack of coke.

Marketing can make people aware of a new type of product or make people aware of a problem they didn't know they had before (this was really successful back in the early 1900s when razor companies convinced American women they had to shave their legs and armpits), but it's not the only problem.

It seems to me that what is successful (for the products they showed) is related to a simple, distinctive product that offers something tangible. The iPod can play music and store a lot more than Walkmans. You actually pay for it, so you know what you get. When you buy a song on ITMS, you buy it; not you have the right to listen to it until you stop paying your bill. This is why Apple's ITMS was more successful than the other record companies' earlier attempts.

They talked about satellite radio not being as popular. I think the problem is you have to buy the product (the head unit), plus get a subscription. Barriers of entry are high, and then its one more bill that you pay every month. With DVRs (which are cool, but didn't get adopted as fast as DVDs), many consumers aren't quite sure what they're getting because the category and pricing schemes aren't able to overcome the idea of just going to the store and buying a DVD. Aha! Tangible.

Because of subscriptions and other ways of extracting reoccurring sources of revenue from the consumer, it's the business model that drives product adoption just as much as marketing.

the routine

[AlexTheBeast]

The hype cycle isn't just for electronics. Think about IPOs.

Here's the referenced chart...
hype chart

Here's the yahoo 5 year IPO chart...
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=YHOO&t=5y&l=on&z=m &q=l&c=

Same pathway...

The is the pathway of ANYTHING new being introduced into the world. First, it's sexy and popular, then it's over done, and then it either levels off or dies.

Easy but expensive to shortcut

[AKAImBatman]

The "technology hype cycle" is fairly easy to shortcut if you have independent testers *use* the product instead of just releasing it to the market. For example, anyone who *used* the Audrey for any period of time could have told you that it would be a complete flop. It was underpowered, slow, and overall useless. OTOH, Apple made sure that people (especially Jobs himself) *used* the iPod before release. Changes were made based on that usage, and the product was better for it.

Of course, that's no guarantee of success. It's quite possible that the product will fail because people don't "get it". In that case you have to watch what your focus groups do. Do they sort of bumble with the thing, with no idea what they're doing? Would they actually keep using it if they weren't forced to? Do they make use of most of the features, or do they ignore them? Most of this can be found by quiet observation of the user with the device. Don't answer questions. Just let them figure it out.

If there's little that can be done about the complexity, then you're going to need a good advertising campaign. Manuals will help, but they only come *after* the purchase. It's much better to explain why they need the device before purchase so that they'll jump right in with the designed goals in mind.

Blame the Press

[plasticmillion]

I find it ironic that Gartner came up with this concept (it's been around for years, incidentally), since analysts and journalists are the ones who propagate this system.

It goes something like this: some new technology starts to look like the next big thing. Journalists hype it to the moon since it gives them something "truly revolutionary" to talk about. As a result, expectations get all blown out of proportion.

Then when the technology inevitably fails to live up to the hype within some ridiculously short timeframe, they have yet another big story to promote: "Is XYZ a hopeless failure?". Two stories for the price of one!

The moral is not to believe what you read in the papers. Sure, there are plenty of revolutionary technologies emerging, but these things take much, much longer than the press would have us believe.

Re: The technology hype cycle

[manavendra]

There was not an absolute iota of information in that article that I could make use of, or carry over with me. It smacks of absolute useless-ness, like a number of other articles

1. A graph with different tehnologies/device listed against the time it took for them to "mature", with funny names given to each trough and crest of popularity, does not make an insightful report.

2. There has been no mention of whose definiton of "product maturity" has been used. It is a term widely open for interpretation

3. It is hilarious to compare the effectiveness, acceptability and market penetration of such varied products as DVD players and PDAs, and so on. There are host of factors that come into play, least of which is the sense of an inane need within the target customer segment.

I bet that article concludes something. Though I certainly wish it was something more focused than a wannabe "we will have more power in our hands in the future"!

What _really_ matters?

[RsG]

Porn

No, seriously, new technology is frequently propelled forward by its capacity for smut. Show of hands: How many /.ers got broadband or upgraded their modems in order to meet more women named .jpeg or her lovely sisters .mpeg? As far as that goes it's an often overlooked fact that porno movies go back to the beginning of film. The "hype circle" is just another way of saying "lookit that, no nipple pixels!" :-)

(And yes I realized how it's ironic to ask for a show of hands WRT porn. At least I didn't ask you to show both hands.)