> If scaling doesn't stall out soon, then I honestly have no idea what to expect the visibility curve to look like. Is there any historical precedent for a technology's scope of potential applications expanding this much this fast?
Lots of pre-internet technologies went through this curve. PCs during the clock speed race, aircraft before that during the aeronautics surge of the 50s, cars when Detroit was in its heydays. In fact, cloud computing was enabled by the breakthroughs in PCs which allowed commodity computing to be architected in a way to compete with mainframes and servers of the era. Even the original industrial revolution was actually a 200-year ish period where mechanization became better and better understood.
Personally I've always been a bit confused about the Gartner Hype Cycle and its usage by pundits in online comments. As you say it applies to point changes in technology but many technological revolutions have created academic, social, and economic conditions that lead to a flywheel of innovation up until some point on an envisioned sigmoid curve where the innovation flattens out. I've never understood how the hype cycle fits into that and why it's invoked so much in online discussions. I wonder if folks who have business school exposure can answer this question better.
Lots of pre-internet technologies went through this curve. PCs during the clock speed race, aircraft before that during the aeronautics surge of the 50s, cars when Detroit was in its heydays. In fact, cloud computing was enabled by the breakthroughs in PCs which allowed commodity computing to be architected in a way to compete with mainframes and servers of the era. Even the original industrial revolution was actually a 200-year ish period where mechanization became better and better understood.
Personally I've always been a bit confused about the Gartner Hype Cycle and its usage by pundits in online comments. As you say it applies to point changes in technology but many technological revolutions have created academic, social, and economic conditions that lead to a flywheel of innovation up until some point on an envisioned sigmoid curve where the innovation flattens out. I've never understood how the hype cycle fits into that and why it's invoked so much in online discussions. I wonder if folks who have business school exposure can answer this question better.