Technology Trend – Minus the Hype

Posted by Udayan Banerjee on November 23, 2010 · 9 Comments 

If you are a pragmatist, you sure would like make your technology investment decision after discounting all the hype that surrounds the emerging technologies. The task is not easy since among all the hype around the new technologies a real inflection point may be hiding – and you would definitely not want to miss that. What is the best way to do it?

You should start by asking the following questions …

1. What are the specific trigger points that started the hype?
2. How much has the technology moved in last one year?
3. If the current trend continues then where will it be in one year time?
4. What happens if you take no action on the specific technology for next one year?

In this post I will answer the first and the second question for all the technologies that are of interest to me. I will follow this up with subsequent separate posts where I will take a deeper dive and answer question 3 and 4 for each of the technologies. So, let me start …

Technology		What are the specific trigger points that started the hype?	How much has the technology moved in last one year?
Cloud Computing (Tortoise)[Answers to question 3&4]		Success of Salesforce.com Realization that virtualization can significantly improve server utilization Success of Amazon Web Service Prediction by analyst that a large centralized infrastructure provider can achieve an economy of scale	Nothing much has changed in last one year Concerns about security and reliability continue to be there. There has been no breakthrough announcement. Though everybody has jumped into the bandwagon, the improvements in the cloud offerings have only been incremental. None of the PaaS platforms have shown much traction.
Mobile Computing (Elephant)[Answers to question 3&4]		Mobile story is more than 10 years old and has already gone through one complete hype cycle.The trigger point for the current hype is: Launch of iPhone Prediction that Smartphone Sales To Beat PC Sales By 2011 (see this) Mobile Web usage more than doubling YoY (see this)	Launch of iPad has open up a whole new chapter in mobile computing Android devices has become the second largest selling mobile handset after Symbian (see this) HTML5 on mobile is maturing and it provides features which was earlier in the realm of the native applications (see this) There is a tussle going between Google & Apple to corner the mobile ad spend
Web 2.0 (Chameleon)[Answers to question 3&4]		Tim O’Reilly & Dale Dougherty had coined the term in 2003. It was inspired by the success of, among others: Wikipedia Google Adsense Flickr Bit torrent Blogosphere See the original article by Tim O’Reilly written on 2005.	The term Web 2.0 is used less frequently and has been replaced by the term Social Media Facebook has emerged – some of the statistics indicate that it has become the most visited web site (see this) Google vs. Facebook is the big story Twitter has gained significant ground on instant crowd sourced news Wikipedia is still free and without advertisement. (If you want it to remain so then please contribute)
SOA (Phoenix)[Answers to question 3&4]		The basic concept of a service bus has been around since the 80’s. However, the term SOA was first used by Alexander Pasik in 1994.It became the “in thing” with the emergence of Web Services. However, last year many experts pronounced the obituary of SOA. (see this & this)	Recent survey result tend to show significant increase in adoption of SOA (see this & the original) Expert view is that for hybrid cloud SOA is critical (see this) Also for multi-channel applications – specially mobile applications (see this)
Agile Methodologies (Starfish)[Answers to question 3&4]		There was no well defined trigger point for agile methodologies – not even the formulation of the manifesto. Though the Agile Manifesto was formulated in 2001, many of the agile methodologies predate the manifesto. There was no immediate hype following the formulation of the manifesto. Agile never appeared in the Gartner Hype Cycle.	The adoption rate slowly climbed over the years. It has been more like the Starfish than the Spider (what is Starfish vs. Spider? Explanation – Short & Long)The growth has been steady and recent survey points to impressive adoption. (see this, this & the original)

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Filed under Agile (archived), Cloud Computing, Featured, Mobile, Trend, Web 2.0 · Tagged with Agile Methodology, Cloud Computing, Mobile Computing, SOA, Social Media, Web 2.0