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Corporate America Cools On Blockchain. Gartner Sees 'Disconnect Between Hype and Reality' (bloomberg.com)

"Corporate America's love affair with all things blockchain may be cooling," reports Bloomberg. An anonymous reader quotes their report. [Alternate version here.] A number of software projects based on the distributed ledger technology will be wound down this year, according to Forrester Research Inc. And some companies pushing ahead with pilot tests are scaling back their ambitions and timelines. In 90 percent of cases, the experiments will never become part of a company's operations, the firm estimates. Even Nasdaq Inc., a high-profile champion of blockchain and cryptocurrencies, hasn't moved as quickly as hoped. The exchange operator, which talked in 2016 about deploying blockchain for voting in shareholder meetings and private-company stock issuance, isn't using the technology in any widely deployed projects yet...

"The disconnect between the hype and the reality is significant -- I've never seen anything like it," said Rajesh Kandaswamy, an analyst at Gartner Inc. "In terms of actual production use, it's very rare...." Only 1 percent of chief information officers said they had any kind of blockchain adoption in their organizations, and only 8 percent said they were in short-term planning or active experimentation with the technology, according to a Gartner study. Nearly 80 percent of CIOs said they had no interest in the technology. Many companies that previously announced blockchain rollouts have changed plans

Problems include the fact that most blockchains "also can't yet handle a large volume of transactions," and worries about compatibility with other software -- which some hope to address next year with software certification testing. But at least two big tech companies are aggressively pushing blockchain.

"So far, IBM and Microsoft have grabbed 51 percent of the more than $700 million market for blockchain products and services, WinterGreen Research Inc. estimated earlier this year,"

4 of 84 comments (clear)

  1. Holy Vapor, Batman by glomph · · Score: 5, Informative

    Because 'blockchain' sounds better than 'redundant distributed database', a term (and technology) that's been around & constantly improved for ages.

    Buzzword bullshit does not create reality, unless you are in the Cult of the Orangutan.

    1. Re:Holy Vapor, Batman by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Blockchain technology is real, and has some interesting applications and uses, but I guess the business folks are figuring out it's not some magic get-rich-quick sauce. I'm fine with the hype cooling off, as now the computer scientists / programmers can settle down and start figuring out how to make use of it for real and fix some of its deficiencies and problem areas, rather than slapping a label on a product or service by less scrupulous folks to manipulate stock prices.

      Dare I hope the same thing happens with "AI" soon? Personally, I just substitute "advanced pattern recognition" anywhere I see the term "AI", which helps, but I'm still getting a bit tired of the hype.

      --
      Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
    2. Re:Holy Vapor, Batman by 14erCleaner · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Please, please, please: list some of these uses. I've asked this question before, and gotten silence in response. What is the use of this "$700 million" technology? What is it good for, other than evading the law?

      --
      Have you read my blog lately?
  2. Inevitable by Brett+Buck · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Because almost no one in the corporate world even understood what "blockchain" even means. They heard and saw a bunch of hype, they were afraid of missing the bandwagon, so they just reflexively "adopted" it.

    It's very similar to the era where if you "had a website", your lack of a business plan or completely idiotic business plan, everyone jumped because "websites are going to be big!" Nobody know what they were really getting then, either, hence. Pets.com. etc.