Waiting for the drop

When Jackie Fenn left IT company Logics to join the analyst group Gartner in 1994, the World Wide Web was just beginning its move from a research curiosity to a global phenomenon. Fenn´s job as an analyst was to look at this and other emerging technologies, such as video-on-demand, and gauge their likely impact on large companies and governments around the world. Looking back at previous technology introductions, Fenn found a common pattern. Whether it was artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, high-level computer languages or personal computers, each had been through a period of inflated expectations only for people to later lose patience and walk away until finally they made some impact on the market. Although it is hard to look at the evolution of technology without seeing these repeated waves of excitement and ennui, Fenn gave the phenomenon a name. At the start of 1995, she wrote a one-off report pointing out the phases that afflict most technology introductions, providing titles such as the Peak of Inflated Expectations or the Trough of Disillusionment, leading finally to the Plateau of Productivity and populating each with examples. The context for the report was to indicate the generic trade-offs between risk and benefit of each stage, under the heading ´When to leap on the Hype Cycle´.