[crwalker]

I've found the Gartner hype cycle paradigm to be vastly overrated after experiencing real hype cycles in several industries.

If you examine their hype cycle charts over about a decade, you'll notice that technologies join or leave the chart randomly, and very few actually move in a linear fashion along the hype cycle: the charts offer no real predictive power.

I think the "hype cycle" narrative only matches a small fraction of tech innovations. Sometimes tech is adopted in a fairly smooth sigmoid. Sometimes it dies suddenly pre-plateau because it was actually vaporware or a substitute became more competitive. Sometimes there's a single giant hype cycle (dot-com?). Sometimes there are several repeating cycles (looking at you today, cryptocurrencies).

[Alex63]

Gartner's publicity pieces, including hype cycles and magic quadrants, serve the purpose of giving non-technical executives and decision makers a high-level understanding of the risk of choosing a particular technology or vendor. For these users, all that matters is getting a snapshot of the present moment.

Gartner also sells research and analysis reports, and subscriptions for these services. These materials, IME, are of higher quality and can be a good introduction or exploration of a particular issue or technology. But they are definitely more oriented toward the senior leader than to the person in the trenches.

[crwalker]

Fair enough: I am most critical of the hype cycle itself, and haven't looked through the longer publications in detail.