Like every year, Gartner, the technology firm has released the technology trends for the coming years. CTOs, CIOs, and CEOs worldwide are evaluating these technologies to figure out the technological efforts they should be focused on and how to strategically implement them.
It 1995, Gartner started to publish the top emergent technology trends and since then, its predictions have gained a reputation among the tech community. Since 1995, this model is seen as the new technology adoption guide. The graph is divided according to maturity, in other words, is it an emergent technology or a technological trigger, is there excessive enthusiasm or overestimation, disappointment and gradual adoption of such technology.
Those who lived those days would remember this assistant was not very successful. It was a nuisance rather than a help. Finally, at Redmon´s decided to eliminate it. Today, almost 25 years later, these virtual assistants are living a second youth thanks to the Chatbots.
And why this? Because researchers, startups and leading technology companies continue to develop this type of technology years after and turn an extravagant idea into something essential for the society.
Primera curva de Gartner 1995
Gartner’s Hype cycle today
This year, the trends curve highlights emergent technologies with a strong impact on the businesses, society and people for the next 10 years. In 2019, the list includes a technology offer ranging from low latency global internet, a virtual map of the real world and imitation of human creativity.
However, this hype has been trending down with “fewer things” on its right side lately, which means Gartner intends to focus more on technologies that can really make it. This is due to a negative opinion of Gartner’s curve during recent years as very few technology trends on the list have been able to overcome the theoretical phase.
As a matter of fact, looking at this curve, there isn´t any blockchain, artificial intelligence, digital twins, deep learning, augmented reality this year as these technologies have been widely implemented. However, analyzing the firm´s lists of recent years, we´ll see that some technologies which had a two-year development period have taken over a decade to start being a reality. For example, in 1995, voice recognition was allegedly at its productivity phase, however, it is now that it has its “place in the world” thanks to the development of deep learning. Two decades later.
Thus, we might think Gartner´s predictions are not very good. None of its 24 curves of emergent technologies included virtualization; NoSQL; open-source, Map Reduce or Hadoop. This is an overestimation of emerging technologies or simply that they do not follow Gartner´s curve rules.
