Disrupting disruptive disruption predictions

Okay, now I’m mad.

According to Gartner, in an August 2007 press release that just caught my attention, “[Research Fellow] Jackie Fenn has been authoring the hype cycle for emerging technologies for 12 years.”

This means she published the first Gartner hype cycle in August, 1996, more or less.

The Gartner hype cycle (technology trigger, peak of inflated expectations, trough of disillusionment, slope of enlightenment, plateau of productivity) looks suspiciously like the Technology Life Cycle — Hype, Disillusionment, Application — I published in InfoWorld three months prior (“Welcome to the Technology Life Cycle,” IS Survival Guide, May 6,1996).

Coincidence? Perhaps. Still, I’d appreciate an explanation. If anyone at Gartner is enlightened enough to read KJR and cares to respond, I’ll publish the official account here.

Speaking of Gartner, one of their recent “predictions” (reported in “Most disruptive technologies,” by Clint Boulton, eWeek, undated), is that by 2026 the world will move beyond “mere semantic hypertext,” whatever that means, to a “true semantic environment.”

Eighteen years ago the NCSA had not yet developed Mosaic, the world’s first Web browser. Since I don’t recall Gartner predicting Web 2.0’s 2008 emergence back in 1990, and do recall it predicting the eventual triumph of OS/2 … well, you see the problem.

Not that this is an unsafe forecast, other than the timetable. If Moore’s law still has any meaning, by 2026 computers will be roughly 4,000 times more powerful than they are today. They’d better have mastered semantics — the difference between computers not understanding us and computers misunderstanding us. Think speech-to-text software on a very off day, only with much more severe consequences. Very disruptive.

The world will be as different from today in 2026 as today is from 1990. Semantic processing might as well get some of the credit.

Except that by then, WIFI Into the Frontal Lobes (WIFL) technology will probably have left the labs, making semantic processing irrelevant.

As long as I’m in the mood to sneer, here’s a quick critique of a few of Gartner’s other disruptive technologies:

Augmented reality, also User interface: Virtual reality with more immersive controls. Biggest immediate benefit — virtual monitors via wearable headsets mean you can use a keyboard in an airplane seat without risking a crushed LCD should the passenger in front of you suddenly recline.

Biggest disruptive impact — new, potentially deadly forms of malware. Imagine a convincing but false VR animation, shown to someone wearing a fully immersive interface, perhaps displaying an empty intersection and a green light to a pedestrian who faces heavy traffic and a Don’t Walk sign in actual reality.

Nicer disruptive impact — you point your eyeglasses-mounted camera at the person approaching you at a conference. A voice in your ear says, “It’s Jill Schwartz, the wife of John Schwartz, the CFO of XYZ Corp (your biggest client). The last time you spoke, her Chihuahua was sick.”

Context-aware computing: This might mean something but I’m not entirely sure. I think it means Microsoft Bob.

Disruptive impact — an order-of-magnitude increase in irritation as computers try to be increasingly helpful when you really don’t want them to be.

What it could be: If I type, “Bruises are black, blue and gray,” and decide to reorder the list, when I move “gray” before “blue” my word processor would automatically relocate the “and” and various commas for me.

Enterprise social software: This isn’t entirely new — telephones and e-mail are early examples.

Enterprise social software won’t be disruptive, for a simple reason. Companies that already recognize the importance of free-form communication among employees will still value it — just do it better. Companies that don’t still won’t, and won’t use it.

Multicore and hybrid servers: Gartner’s #1 disruptive technology — honest! Here’s the quote: “Programmers will have to learn parallel coding, or how to write applications for the unpredictability of machines leveraging multiple cores. In addition, more cores running more applications mean more opportunities for failure, so management specialists will have to learn how to rebuild the systems that break. Multicore will also impact the way operating systems get built.”

Yes, multicore will have an impact on the way operating systems get built. Also compilers. The impact will be to insulate programmers from having to learn parallel coding and all the rest of it.

We’ve been here before and we’ve seen the results. With the fifth repetition, prediction becomes easy.

As someone once said, those who fail to learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat the seventh grade.