I fell over this a while ago. I don’t want to mention you know what, but I think there is some other interesting predictions and estimates on this hype cycle.
I initially found this version of Gartner’s hype cycle in an entry from Dion Hinchcliffe, and I asked him who made it. Apparently he repurposed this from a Marketing chart, and he encouraged me to blog about it… So here I am.
I especially like the placements of “RSS” and “word of mouth”. I am convinced that “word of mouth” has disappointed a lot now as a marketing stunt, and did not live up to the hype it had received. Though I think that currently the term viral marketing will be hyped up, and then we just start over again with another word for roughly the same thing. Word of mouth can indeed be a very powerful tool and have helped a lot of emerging technologies and websites to gain momentum and reach a critical mass. But as a sole marketing strategy I believe it can turn to be very unreliable. But maybe it will all go better for viral marketing!!!
I also agree on the placement of RSS. Even though it has existed a long time now, it is still being hyped as “The truth” by many. There is so many ideas for its usage and, and I thinks one of its powers is that it is relatively (to what?!) simple to make and use. It has soon to disprove some of the hyped usages, and reach a more realistically position. Personally I have a hard time seeing what the major problems and disappointments should be, but then again I only use it at a moderate level, and don’t expect it to do much more for me that it does now. My guess is that RSS will reach the plateau of productivity by the time Microsoft Launches Vista. While they are the incumbent and thereby naturally have a large amount of inertia, we still await them to implement and use RSS.