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Gartner Gartner on the wall, which is the hypest cycle of them all?

(2021/08/24)


Comment It always comes around sooner than you think. With a large slice of fantasy, cultural mythology, and suspension of disbelief, it's time to get out the tinsel and celebrate the arrival of this year's Gartner hype cycle.

Officially the " [1]Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, 2021 ", the research documents trends the tech industry would like to talk about, even if few emerge fully formed into anything we would understand as the real world.

Top of the gift list this year are nonfungible tokens (NFT), sovereign cloud, data fabric, generative AI, and composable networks, all supposedly arriving to help beat the competition in some way or other, the omnipresent analyst organisation said.

[2]

"Technology innovation is a key enabler of competitive differentiation and is the catalyst for transforming many industries," according to Brian Burke, research vice president at Gartner. "Breakthrough technologies are continually appearing, challenging even the most innovative organisations to keep up. Leading organisations will lean on the emerging technologies in this year's Hype Cycle to build trust and new growth opportunities against a background of continued strategic change and economic uncertainty."

[3]

[4]

The Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies is unique among most Gartner Hype Cycles, the press release babbles on, because it distils insights from more than 1,500 technologies into a succinct set of "must know" emerging technologies and trends that show promise in delivering a high degree of competitive advantage over the next five to 10 years.

[5]Customers warn Gartner of AWS's high-pressure sales tactics in latest verdict on public cloud providers

[6]Leeds City Council swallows the Gartner glossary and orders up 'post-modern' ERP in £44m SAP replacement

[7]Hijacked, rampaging infrastructure will kill humans by 2025 – Gartner

[8]Where on Gartner's Hype Cycle is Gartner's Hype Cycle?

In a statement singularly lacking in self-awareness, Melissa Davis, research vice president at Gartner, added that organisations should "cut through the hype surrounding emerging technologies" as if her esteemed employers were not providing a continual stream of risible hyperbole.

Now, The Register [9]has published a definite debunking of the hype machine, pointing out that, even on its own terms, many of its earlier predictions fail to see the light of day in any recognisable form. For example, just five years ago Smart Dust, 4G printing, and General Purpose Machine Intelligence appeared on the list. Quantum computing seems to appear and disappear from the list almost at random as if springing from some kind of probability field.

Other items appear out of nowhere. The aforementioned NFTs, now darling of the post-bonkers blockchain bubble, is right at the top of the hype cycle for 2021. And yet, just a year ago, it was nowhere to be seen, at least according to the media-shared graph.

[10]

Conversely, concepts said to be on the up last year, such as two-way brain-machine interfaces, have disappeared without a trace on this year's chart. It's enough to make a confused observer wonder if the whole enterprise is even a vaguely reliable predictor of future technologies, or – heaven forbid – a pantomime engineered to keep Gartner's name and logo in the spotlight.

But for those who keep score, the highlights of this year's list includes quantum machine learning, machine-readable legislation, and homomorphic encryption.

Maybe we are indeed entering the season when if you believe something enough, it just might come true. ®

Get our [11]Tech Resources



[1] https://www.gartner.com/en/webinars/4004100/the-gartner-hype-cycle-for-emerging-technologies-2021

[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/personaltech&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YSUXtvr5uDxoUdGZJPYf@gAAAEA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0

[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/personaltech&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YSUXtvr5uDxoUdGZJPYf@gAAAEA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0

[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/personaltech&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YSUXtvr5uDxoUdGZJPYf@gAAAEA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0

[5] https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/03/gartner_verdict_on_public_cloud/

[6] https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/03/leeds_city_council_erp/

[7] https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/21/gartner_op_tech_risk/

[8] https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/19/gartner_hype_cycle/

[9] https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/19/gartner_hype_cycle/

[10] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/personaltech&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YSUXtvr5uDxoUdGZJPYf@gAAAEA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0

[11] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/



Gartner's Hype Cycle report is useful...

My-Handle

How else would we fill out our management buzzword bingo cards for the next few months?

The title says it all!

Plest

It's called the "Hype Cycle", that says all I need to know!

Right, back in the real world and get back to working on these old Windows2008R2/SQL Server 2012 boxes that the company won't let go of in case the ancient in-house app that keeps the company afloat stops working!

Missing phase

trevorde

Tomb of Despair

just after the 'Trough of Disillusionment', it is a pit into which hyped technologies disappear, only to reemerge a few years later in 'Technology Trigger'. Some technologies are doomed to this cycle forever eg VR, AR, quantum computing

Re: Missing phase

Pascal Monett

You posted that exact same comment in the Gartner Debunked article.

You could have gone through the effort of at least sprucing it up a bit.

Re: Missing phase

DJV

He did - he put a different posting date on it!

Re: Missing phase

Potemkine!

Reusability is a pillar of IT (claim vendors for the last 50 years)

Re: You posted that exact same comment

Anonymous Coward

It's just statistics.

The likelihood of commentard repeating themselves, that is.

Thank goodness that you and I are not so fallible. ;-)

Even a stopped clock

Greybearded old scrote

Has anyone kept track of Gartner's predictions?

I remember when they were frequently predicting that Linux would never amount to anything, 'coz Windows Rulez! Now only desktops and iThings have a significant presence of anything else.

Re: Even a stopped clock

Charlie Clark

Most of the predictions are total wank. But the curve itself has proved useful, not least for fending questions from clueless MBAs.

And Linux is still only a server OS. But we didn't need Gartner to know that.

Re: Even a stopped clock

eswan

"And Linux is still only a server OS. But we didn't need Gartner to know that."

And telephones. And televisions, And embedded systems, switches, routers. And my desktop.

Sci-Fi

Potemkine!

Gartner is fun, but I nonetheless prefer Phllip K. Dick. His anticipations look more realistic than Gartner's ones.

Re: Sci-Fi

Arthur the cat

Hmm. Zuckerberg as Palmer Eldritch. Shudder.

Wonderment in words...

steamnut

Now I know what the expression "word salad" really means.

They probably have a simple program with a random number generator and a list of the latest buzzwords and just press "run". The joke is that people pay them massive sums of money to read it!

Re: Wonderment in words...

Geoff May (no relation)

... and I bet they nicked the code from the BOFH Excuse Generator.

Aahh, Yes!

ST

"Technology innovation is a key enabler of competitive differentiation and is the catalyst for transforming many industries [ ...]"

That clarifies everything. Thank You, Gartner.

Chris G

"Technology innovation is a key enabler of competitive differentiation and is the catalyst for transforming many industries,"

Thank you Gartner! Thank you so much!

For stating the bleeding obvious.

I'll make a prediction; 'This prediction will be more likely to bear fruit than the next prediction from Gartner.'

We all declare for liberty, but in using the same word we do not all mean
the same thing.
-- A. Lincoln