The Gartner “Emerging Technologies Hype Cycle” is something worth giving a good once-over every year. The premise is that most technologies that eventually get traction will first go through a “Peak of Inflated Expectations” with lots of publicity and a lot of unsuccessful applications by the early adopters. This is followed by the “Trough of Disillusionment” (got to love these terms!) where the bad experiences cause bad press. The “Slope of Enlightenment” is a quiet period during which the technology is not much talked about, but experimentation continues and the best applications are discovered. Finally the implementations stabilize and the advantages become accepted during the “Plateau of Productivity”.

There are 2 important aspects for a technology – where it is on the curve, and how fast it’s moving.

Here is this year’s:

2006_hype_curve

Get the full summary from Gartner here.

One Comment

  1. Paul Watson

    Interesting that they place Ajax in the trough. I’d say the “bad press” is still far outweighed by the hype and that we are nowhere near a quiet, stabilising plateau for Ajax. There is at least still a year of mistakes to make before it begins to mature.

    Good chart though.

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