Gartner Hype Cycle
Technologies often move through a collective emotional curve: excitement outruns practical reality, disappointment arrives when implementation proves difficult, and durable value emerges only after expectations become more disciplined.
An entire industry can lose interest the way one person abandons a difficult project: enthusiasm surges, reality intrudes, and attention drains away before the useful work is finished.
E1When an industry enters the dip
The Gartner Hype Cycle treats adoption as more than a technical process. Expectations move too. Early possibility attracts attention faster than a technology can acquire reliable tools, infrastructure, skills, and proven uses. When those missing pieces become visible, excitement reverses into disappointment. The technology may not have suddenly worsened; the emotional forecast has collided with implementation.
That makes the cycle an industry-scale version of losing momentum in a project: the difficult middle separates initial promise from repeatable value. What survives that middle can be judged by working applications rather than imagined potential.
E1A curve is not a clock
The model describes a possible pattern, not a timetable or guarantee. Disappointment does not prove that eventual value is waiting underneath: some technologies fail because their economics, capabilities, or uses never become viable. Calling every collapse a temporary trough can turn a useful lens into an excuse for wishful thinking.
Audit the missing machinery
When evaluating a heavily promoted technology, write down one promised use and the concrete dependencies required to deliver it reliably—tools, infrastructure, skills, cost, and evidence. Then track which dependencies are actually improving. That separates progress through the difficult middle from enthusiasm merely waiting for another headline.
Episodes that teach this
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You'll Always Lose Interest in Everything - The Dip - FutureIQ
· explained at 9:44
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"same concept... applied to an entire industry instead of one person or one project"