PREDICTING THE “NEXT BIG THING” IN TECHNOLOGY—THE DIRTY LITTLE SECRET GARTNER DOESN’T WANT YOU TO KNOW

I’ve debunked the Gartner’s Emerging Technology Hype Cycle by plotting results from 2008-2014 and you won’t believe what I found.

We’re all familiar with the science, expense and effort put into predicting winners in the stock market, and at sporting events.  I wanted to see what went into finding the next big thing in technology and felt Gartner was the right place to start.

Gartner, Inc. (NYSE: IT) is a $7B company and is the self-proclaimed world’s leading information technology research and advisory company. “We deliver the technology-related insight necessary for our clients to make the right decisions, every day.” Gartner boasts clients in over 9,100 distinct enterprises worldwide, 6,600 associates, and 1,500 research analysts and consultants.  Impressive, right?

I took data from the Emerging Technology Hype Cycle from 2008-2014, then compared what they predicted and charted those predictions over time.  Next, I looked at what has become mainstream and what hasn’t.  The results were shocking.

What I found:

My first realization was that most of the technologies they predicted to make it to the Plateau of Productivity in 0-2 years are already gaining market stability and adoption. This means that Gartner is behind the curve. In the past 7 years they have only identified 5 technologies as Plateau of Productivity worthy:

• Web Services (’08)
• Pen centric Tablets ( ’10)
• Predictive Analytics (’13)
• Speech Recognition (’13)
• Location Aware Applications (’11)

Even more astonishing than the technologies Gartner missed were the ones theymentioned—but then failed to follow up on or track with any kind of rigor or consistency.  Though Gartner never did, I certainly (at some point) would have designated these previously listed Hype Cycle technologies as Plateau of Productivity candidates:

• eBook readers
• App Stores
• Crowd Sourcing
• 4G
• HTML5
• Web 2.0
• Video Telepresence
• Wikis
• Service Oriented Architecture
• Private cloud computing (or virtualization)
• Solid State Drives
• Media tablets
• Natural language questions answering
• Internet TV
• Cloud computing

Further proof that each year is nothing more than point in time musings include:

• 112 of the 117 technologies (96%) existed in only 1 or 2 stages of the cycle and 0 of 117 (0%) made it through more than 3 phases of the cycle in 7 years.
• 79 of 117 (67%) of the technologies identified only showed up on the cycle for one or two years.
• Cloud computing and augmented reality were the only two listed all seven years but neither of them made it to the Plateau of Productivity level.  (I think cloud computing is there. Am I wrong?)

These aren’t scientifically based predictions. They are merely in the moment feelings, not worth much more than ten minutes entertainment for the casual reader. However, with no retrospective reports with which to do follow-up, there’s no one calling them out as such.