Speaker 1: Welcome to tex Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: Hey there, and welcome to tex Stuff. I'm your host,
Speaker 1: Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
Speaker 1: and I love all things tech. And there is an
Speaker 1: increasing amount of conversation around the concept of the metaverse,
Speaker 1: which is pretty amusing because there's no real definition of
Speaker 1: what a metaverse is or will be. But generally speaking,
Speaker 1: most versions I've seen revolve around some combination of virtual
Speaker 1: reality or VR and augmented reality or a R implementations
Speaker 1: that allow for a persistent and pervasive integration of digital
Speaker 1: and physical realities. How's that for some consultant marketing speak. Now,
Speaker 1: some versions lean way more on the VR side and
Speaker 1: suggest that the next phase of the Internet will be
Speaker 1: made up of virtual spaces and people roaming around as avatars.
Speaker 1: By the way, that is an idea that has been
Speaker 1: around for a long time, with folks kind of thinking
Speaker 1: of this as a sort of web three point oh
Speaker 1: for ages. Heck, you watch movies where people are accessing
Speaker 1: the Internet, especially from like the nineties, like the late nineties,
Speaker 1: and it almost always was envisioned as you know, navigating
Speaker 1: through a virtual three dimensional space, even though that's not
Speaker 1: how any of us really interface with the Internet, so
Speaker 1: it's interesting that this still is is launching onto that idea. However,
Speaker 1: what all of this has really reminded me of is
Speaker 1: the concept of the hype cycle, which is not a
Speaker 1: super enthusiastic two wheeled vehicle. It's, you know, kind of
Speaker 1: a concept here. It's um the hype cycle, or more
Speaker 1: properly Gartner's hype cycle, because it's from the research company Gardner.
Speaker 1: It's a way to describe the stages that a concept
Speaker 1: or technology goes through from ideation, as in the first
Speaker 1: announcement of the tech, not just the thinking of it,
Speaker 1: but even just the expression of what attack might do,
Speaker 1: all the way to actual realization and adoption. It's not
Speaker 1: a straight path. In fact, it's got very curvy. If
Speaker 1: you look at a graphic of the hype cycle, it's
Speaker 1: almost always shown as a curve. It starts off low,
Speaker 1: peaks up, slopes down, dramatically bottoms out, and then slowly
Speaker 1: grows from there. That's that's how it always looks. So
Speaker 1: it's a journey that includes diversions into overenthusiastic expectations and
Speaker 1: some trips over into the mundane reality that tech can
Speaker 1: settle into. But we're going to explore all those various
Speaker 1: key moments shortly. First, let's learn a little bit about
Speaker 1: where this came from. So back in a market analyst
Speaker 1: named Jackie Fen created the hype cycle concept by observing
Speaker 1: the typical phases that technologies tend to go through. Now,
Speaker 1: to be clear, this has little to do with the
Speaker 1: capabilities of the tech itself. I mean that does tie
Speaker 1: into it, but it has more to do with the
Speaker 1: general perception of the tech. So you can think of
Speaker 1: it like buzz or excitement. And while there are a
Speaker 1: lot of examples of tech going through these phases, it's
Speaker 1: not exactly a law or anything like that. It's more
Speaker 1: like these are trends that we see pop up frequently, right,
Speaker 1: It's it's a pattern that we've seen repeat itself. So
Speaker 1: there are five phases in the hype cycle. We start
Speaker 1: off with what is called the technology trigger. This is
Speaker 1: when a tech which can be hardware, or it could
Speaker 1: be software, or it could be a service, it could
Speaker 1: be any combination of those things. It just has to
Speaker 1: be new. This is when it first launches in some way.
Speaker 1: And by launches, I don't necessarily mean you actually get
Speaker 1: a physical product that rolls out or an actual service
Speaker 1: that you can subscribe to right at the get go. Instead,
Speaker 1: there's some form of announcement. It might be a demonstration,
Speaker 1: or it might be, you know, something similar along those
Speaker 1: lines that alerts people that this technology exists. I think
Speaker 1: of the mother of all demos, uh, something that we
Speaker 1: often hear about, where things like graphical user interfaces and
Speaker 1: the first computer mouse were really shown off to you know,
Speaker 1: a wider audience. That's sort of an example of a
Speaker 1: technology trigger. If you want to think of something a
Speaker 1: little more recent, although still in our past, think of
Speaker 1: the old Apple press events where Steve Jobs would introduce
Speaker 1: his one more Thing. It was typically something brand new
Speaker 1: from Apple. Now, I should point out that an Apple's case,
Speaker 1: we were mostly talking about technology that had already been
Speaker 1: in some form of existence from other companies, and Apple
Speaker 1: really just went in and refined it and made it,
Speaker 1: you know, aesthetically pleasing, and we're able to market it properly.
Speaker 1: But you know, this is an event that tells the world, hey,
Speaker 1: we've got something neat over here and you should check
Speaker 1: it out. Now. In these early stages, it's not unusual
Speaker 1: for the creators of the technology to promote the heck
Speaker 1: out of it, you know, hiring PR firms and marketing
Speaker 1: firms to really push this out, even if that technology
Speaker 1: has a very limited use case or doesn't actually work yet. So,
Speaker 1: for example, you could argue eight K televisions are somewhere
Speaker 1: in this phase right now because a K TVs have
Speaker 1: been around for a bit, it's not like they're brand new. However,
Speaker 1: there's not really any native eight K content you can
Speaker 1: get on those TVs. So you've got televisions that are
Speaker 1: technically capable of playing ultra ultra high definition video, but
Speaker 1: you have a lack of actual video content that meets
Speaker 1: that level of resolution. So you've got something that's able
Speaker 1: to show you this incredible picture, you just don't have
Speaker 1: any of the content that has that built into it. Now,
Speaker 1: you could argue that eight K t V s are
Speaker 1: actually a bit further along the hype cycle than where
Speaker 1: I'm talking about right now, because most of them can
Speaker 1: actually upscale lower definition video and boost it so it
Speaker 1: looks better. Meanwhile, eight K t V s are marketed
Speaker 1: toward home theater enthusiasts who like to get out their
Speaker 1: set up with the most advanced tech available in the
Speaker 1: space people who make way more money than I do.
Speaker 1: In other words, typically the goal for creators at this
Speaker 1: stage is to talk of the tech so that investors
Speaker 1: become interested in it and they will start to pour
Speaker 1: some money into the efforts to keep things going. So
Speaker 1: this can be a really tense waiting game because you
Speaker 1: need the cash to flow in to operate until a
Speaker 1: market develops that can support the technology. But that also
Speaker 1: means that you have to convince the investors that there
Speaker 1: will be a market for the tech at some point,
Speaker 1: even if there isn't one at that very moment. So
Speaker 1: our starting point is the technology trigger. So if you imagine,
Speaker 1: you know, a graph, and the X axis is marked
Speaker 1: as time, So the further to the right you go,
Speaker 1: the more time has passed, and the y axis is
Speaker 1: marked in expectations. So the higher up on the y
Speaker 1: axis you are, the higher expectations are for this tech. Well,
Speaker 1: the tech trigger would be our starting point. It would
Speaker 1: be at the beginning of our time axis, and it
Speaker 1: wouldn't be very high up on expectations. From there, however,
Speaker 1: we ramp up expectations dramatically in a relatively short amount
Speaker 1: of time. This is where I would argue we are
Speaker 1: in the metaverse conversation right now. We're thinking about possibilities
Speaker 1: with companies like meta Slash Facebook really pushing this concept
Speaker 1: super hard and investing huge amounts of money and dedicating
Speaker 1: enormous teams toward developing stuff that people can actually use.
Speaker 1: Along the way, we might see some early implementations of technology,
Speaker 1: this particular tech, whether it's metaverse or something else. But
Speaker 1: typically the implementations we see during this this early phase
Speaker 1: after the technology trigger, they're really limited, and if they're
Speaker 1: actually available at all to consumers, they're really really expensive.
Speaker 1: This is when bleeding edge early adopters might jump in,
Speaker 1: and we've seen this with lots of tech over the years.
Speaker 1: I remember when CD players first hit the market, compact discs, y'all,
Speaker 1: I'm old. When compact disc players first hit the market,
Speaker 1: they were prohibitively expensive for many people. I mean, they
Speaker 1: were hundreds and hundreds of dollars, and keep in mind
Speaker 1: that with inflation that would probably be more than a
Speaker 1: thousand dollars today, so it was way too expensive for
Speaker 1: people like yours. Truly. I remember I didn't get my
Speaker 1: first CD player, which was actually a little portable CD
Speaker 1: player until years after they had been on the market
Speaker 1: because they were just too expensive. Now, without early adopters,
Speaker 1: most technology, particularly hardware, wouldn't go anywhere, Investors would lose
Speaker 1: confidence in the tech, and companies wouldn't be able to
Speaker 1: scale up to produce stuff at a a scale where
Speaker 1: they could bring prices down. Now, according to the Gartner
Speaker 1: hype cycle, around the time early adopters start exploring tech
Speaker 1: is when mass media really starts to pick up the
Speaker 1: story and run with it and thus push the hype further.
Speaker 1: Then we reached the top of this climb at you
Speaker 1: know where the hype cycle calls it the peak of
Speaker 1: inflated expectations. So this is like the top of the
Speaker 1: first hill in your classic out and back roller coaster.
Speaker 1: It's the highest point that you're ever going to hit.
Speaker 1: And as the name suggests, this is when people have
Speaker 1: the highest expectations for the tech will be able to do. Uh,
Speaker 1: these are expectations that are likely not going to be
Speaker 1: borne out by the technology itself. Now, I can think
Speaker 1: of no better example of a tech that went through
Speaker 1: this particular phase in a way that was incredibly apparent
Speaker 1: than virtual reality. In fact, I could argue that it's
Speaker 1: done this a couple of times now. But back in
Speaker 1: the very late eighties early nineties, the early stages of
Speaker 1: VR had the world anticipating an entirely new experience with computing.
Speaker 1: We would all be immersed in computer virtual worlds, and
Speaker 1: it's a narrative that we're seeing repeated today with the
Speaker 1: metaverse discussions. And there was a lot of exciting R
Speaker 1: and D in the field of VR at this time.
Speaker 1: It's just that our technical capabilities were fairly primitive compared
Speaker 1: to what people were imagining. We had movies and TV
Speaker 1: shows come out that centered on this premise of an
Speaker 1: unbelievably immersive virtual experience, one that in some cases would
Speaker 1: literally pull you into a virtual world. And even this
Speaker 1: idea was preceded by films like Tron, which came out
Speaker 1: before the VR craze had even begun. But then folks
Speaker 1: got a chance to actually experience VR for themselves. I
Speaker 1: remember a VR arcade opened up in a mall not
Speaker 1: too far from where I lived, and so I went
Speaker 1: and paid I think it was like five bucks for
Speaker 1: five minutes in order to experience it. The actual graphics
Speaker 1: in the world were beyond primitive, everything consisted of very
Speaker 1: simple polygons. I played a game called Dactyl Nightmare, infamous
Speaker 1: in VR circles. This was way back in the day
Speaker 1: like uh and Dactyl, by the way, means like like
Speaker 1: Pterodactyl because there was a a quote unquote pterodactyl flying around,
Speaker 1: a bunch of polygons flying around that could occasionally pick
Speaker 1: you up and drop you. It was an interesting example
Speaker 1: of VR capabilities, but it was far from a sophisticated experience,
Speaker 1: and I really recommend going on YouTube and searching videos
Speaker 1: of it if you're interested. Just remember that it's an
Speaker 1: experience that came out in n anyway. The point I'm
Speaker 1: making is that the expectation of what VR would be
Speaker 1: and the reality of what it was that was a
Speaker 1: huge disconnect. As a result, people lost interest in VR
Speaker 1: pretty quickly, and that loss of interest had a devastating
Speaker 1: effect on the VR research industry. Organizations that had previously
Speaker 1: enjoyed financial support found themselves scrounging for money. Some programs
Speaker 1: had to shut down entirely as folks decided that their
Speaker 1: money might be better spent on other pursuits, other investments.
Speaker 1: The VR industry as a whole almost died. Some departments
Speaker 1: that were exploring VRS use and stuff like medical treatments
Speaker 1: were reduced to hacking together VR systems from video game
Speaker 1: peripherals in order to make it work. Devices like the
Speaker 1: Nintendo Power Glove or the PlayStation I or the Microsoft Connect.
Speaker 1: We're all to varying degrees failures in the gaming space,
Speaker 1: but the VR industry took those tools, altered them, and
Speaker 1: made use of them. We'll explore more of the hype
Speaker 1: cycle in just a moment, but first let's take this
Speaker 1: quick break. So VR had entered the third phase of
Speaker 1: the hype cycle. We were at the technology trigger, we
Speaker 1: were at the peak of inflated expectations, and then we
Speaker 1: start to enter the trough of disillusionment. I love the
Speaker 1: names for these phases, by the way. It makes me
Speaker 1: think of things like the Pit of Despair from The
Speaker 1: Princess Bride. But yeah, the trough of disillusionment. So between
Speaker 1: the peak of inflated expectations and the trough of disillusionment
Speaker 1: is a decline that in most versions of the hype cycle.
Speaker 1: It's just as steep as the climb up to the
Speaker 1: peak of inflated expectations and almost as long like you
Speaker 1: almost go down as far as when you first announced
Speaker 1: the technology. UM. In most versions of this cycle, that's
Speaker 1: not necessarily indicative of what every technology goes through, but
Speaker 1: that's typically how it's how it's illustrated. UM. Along the
Speaker 1: way between that peak and that trough, you start encountering
Speaker 1: things like negative press as the media begins to criticize
Speaker 1: the tech for not living up to expectations. Now, this
Speaker 1: is rich and hypocritical, and I think most of the
Speaker 1: press is not blind to the fact that the press
Speaker 1: contributes to inflated expectations. Right. It's part of the press
Speaker 1: covering the stuff that builds up the hype and enthusiasm,
Speaker 1: and then that same press reaps the reward of throwing
Speaker 1: shade at a technology once it fails to meet those
Speaker 1: heightened expectations. So, in other words, the press benefits on
Speaker 1: both sides of this curve. And I mean that's typically
Speaker 1: where the press does its best work, right in the
Speaker 1: sense of where they get the most cash. They end
Speaker 1: up making a lot of getting a lot of attention
Speaker 1: by hyping things up, and then a lot of attention
Speaker 1: by tearing things down up And then once you get
Speaker 1: past that, you know you're still gonna get coverage, but
Speaker 1: it won't be nearly as sensational as that part of
Speaker 1: the hype cycle. So this decline is also when you
Speaker 1: start to see companies that had begun to pop up
Speaker 1: during the climb, you know, companies that were specializing either
Speaker 1: in the technology or producing something that was tangential or
Speaker 1: connected to that technology. You start to see the number
Speaker 1: of companies decrease. There's the sort of fade away by
Speaker 1: the number of players in the space. So there's also
Speaker 1: a lot of consolidation in this stage as well, where
Speaker 1: smaller companies will end up merging together because they wouldn't
Speaker 1: be able to survive on their own. Sometimes they're not
Speaker 1: able to survive even after they merge, and they still,
Speaker 1: you know, they still fail. I'm reminded of the dot
Speaker 1: com craze leading up to two thousand. I was also
Speaker 1: those before. I was working at how Stuff Works, but
Speaker 1: I was working at a consulting firm and a lot
Speaker 1: of our our clients were in the dot com space. Well,
Speaker 1: the during the heyday business was great, but then you
Speaker 1: hit two thousand and two thousand one and things took
Speaker 1: a dramatic turn. We saw so many web based companies
Speaker 1: appear up to that point, a lot of which you know,
Speaker 1: had tons of investments, like ludicrous amounts of venture capital
Speaker 1: pouring into them, even when they had no real business
Speaker 1: plan to support the organization. And then the market shifted
Speaker 1: in two thousand and again in two thousand one, particularly
Speaker 1: after the attacks on nine eleven, and a lot of
Speaker 1: those companies weren't able to survive this shifting market, this
Speaker 1: declining market, and the web as a whole kind of
Speaker 1: entered the trough of disillusionment as people began to realize
Speaker 1: that the gold rush days of the web really weren't
Speaker 1: going to pay off, at least not at this crazy
Speaker 1: return on investment that people had anticipated. Now typically around
Speaker 1: the trough, only a small percentage of the text potential
Speaker 1: customer base has actually adopted the technology, so we haven't
Speaker 1: really gone beyond early adopters yet. We're talking less than
Speaker 1: ten percent of the potential market, maybe less than five
Speaker 1: of the potential market, even having bought into the tech
Speaker 1: at this point. But on the flip side, when you
Speaker 1: hit rock bottom, there's nowhere left to go but up,
Speaker 1: unless you can't rebound at all, in which case you
Speaker 1: go nowhere like you just stop existing. But let's talk
Speaker 1: about the tech that manages to weather this storm in
Speaker 1: the hype cycle. Now, around this time is when we
Speaker 1: typically start to see a new generation of products or
Speaker 1: services based in and around this technology. So the first
Speaker 1: generation will have taught folks what works, what doesn't work,
Speaker 1: and what could work better. So ideally the second generation
Speaker 1: of products will be built upon that knowledge and address
Speaker 1: the flaws and accentuate the things that made the tech
Speaker 1: appealing in the first place, to make better versions. In
Speaker 1: other words, So now we start to enter the fourth phase.
Speaker 1: This is called the slope of enlightenment, or as I
Speaker 1: typeoed in my notes, the slop of enlightenment, which just
Speaker 1: sounds like something that pigs would really enjoy, very thoughtful pigs.
Speaker 1: Now it's the slope of enlightenment. This is when people
Speaker 1: actually figure out what the tech is good for. Now
Speaker 1: it maybe that has uses that were never anticipated during
Speaker 1: the initial hype phase of this technology, and that while
Speaker 1: the real tech can't live up to the grandiose promus
Speaker 1: is of stuff that we heard about during the peak
Speaker 1: of inflated expectations, the stuff it can do might still
Speaker 1: be really compelling. Now that realization might come from the
Speaker 1: creators of the tech themselves. It's actually possible that it's
Speaker 1: what they had in mind the whole time, but the
Speaker 1: hype got away from them, right. They might have said
Speaker 1: this will be very good for X, but during the
Speaker 1: hype phase, the early phase, it's promoted as X to
Speaker 1: the tenth power times a billion, and that's not what
Speaker 1: the creators were ever claiming. That can happen sometimes the
Speaker 1: realization actually comes from outside the creators, with folks figuring
Speaker 1: out really cool uses of this technology that the creators
Speaker 1: had never even really intended. Now, again, this makes me
Speaker 1: think of the Microsoft Connect in that regard. So in
Speaker 1: case you're not familiar with these, the Connect devices were
Speaker 1: peripherals for a couple of different Xbox consoles. There were
Speaker 1: two main generations of the Microsoft Connect. They incorporated cameras,
Speaker 1: including an infrared camera, and microphones that were meant to
Speaker 1: boost the interactive capabilities of an Xbox console. So the
Speaker 1: Connect could sense depth and it could create essentially a
Speaker 1: three D map of a space, and that meant that
Speaker 1: when the Connect was paired with the right software, it
Speaker 1: could sense movement along three axes, the X, Y and
Speaker 1: Z ax s or if you prefer it could sense
Speaker 1: movement left and right, up and down, and toward and
Speaker 1: away from the camera. Now, the purpose of this peripheral
Speaker 1: was to give game developers options to create new kinds
Speaker 1: of games that would lean on those capabilities, like a
Speaker 1: fighting game where your real world motions would be translated
Speaker 1: into the game in some way. Or they could use
Speaker 1: it to create new ways to interact with the Xboxes
Speaker 1: user interface, so that you could do things like activate
Speaker 1: a game with your voice or by gesturing a certain way.
Speaker 1: But what was cool was that the AI and robotics
Speaker 1: fields began to use the connect in their projects. They
Speaker 1: began to hack the connect and make use of it.
Speaker 1: The peripheral was fairly sophisticated, but it was also affordable,
Speaker 1: so it meant that people who otherwise might not be
Speaker 1: able to get hold of the sensors that they needed
Speaker 1: to work on their projects had another option. Sadly, Microsoft
Speaker 1: never really found a way to profit from that. In fact,
Speaker 1: they kind of hamstrung attempts to make use of the
Speaker 1: Connect in this way. They made some changes to the
Speaker 1: connect that actually eliminated those use cases, or at least
Speaker 1: made them much more difficult to do, which is unfortunate
Speaker 1: because the Connect otherwise, you know, it kind of died
Speaker 1: a sad death. It never really reached full adoption by
Speaker 1: the the video game community, largely because there was a
Speaker 1: lack of support from the developer side. But the Connect
Speaker 1: could have continued a very useful life in robotics and AI.
Speaker 1: Unfortunately it just didn't turn out that way. But it's
Speaker 1: the sort of thing that can happen along the hype
Speaker 1: cycle where the hacker community figures out fun ways to
Speaker 1: use or depending on your point of view, misuse a technology. Now,
Speaker 1: gradually the technology emerges from the slope of enlightenment to
Speaker 1: hit the plateau of productivity. Now it's in this phase
Speaker 1: that the text capabilities and usefulness are well understood by
Speaker 1: the market, so it's found its place. It is likely
Speaker 1: not nearly as grand as was expected back in the
Speaker 1: early part of the hype cycle, but it also is
Speaker 1: somewhat sustainable or even profitable. Not all tech reaches the stage,
Speaker 1: mind you, Some just outright fail because the customer base
Speaker 1: never forms around it. I've got a really good example
Speaker 1: of a tech that never reached the plateau of productivity,
Speaker 1: and it is three D Television's Now when I first
Speaker 1: started working at how stuff works dot com, which I
Speaker 1: think was back in two thousand ven. Well, three D
Speaker 1: TVs were being pushed really hard by multiple companies as
Speaker 1: well as by the movie and TV studios, and there
Speaker 1: were a lot of different reasons for this. So from
Speaker 1: the artistic side, you had directors who were convinced that
Speaker 1: making films and three D would give them a new
Speaker 1: set of tools to tell their stories in a way
Speaker 1: that they had envisioned. I'm thinking primarily of folks like
Speaker 1: James Cameron and Peter Jackson. These were directors who really
Speaker 1: embraced elements of three D technology with the thought that
Speaker 1: it was a real way to enhance a story and
Speaker 1: evoke a response from the audience. And since that's what
Speaker 1: storytellers want to do, I kind of understand this. From
Speaker 1: the movie studio side, there were a couple of really
Speaker 1: big reasons to push three D TV and film. One
Speaker 1: of those big reasons is that it is way harder
Speaker 1: to pirate three D movies than two D movies. You
Speaker 1: need special cameras to capture the three D effect, you
Speaker 1: need se shoal equipment to reproduce the three D effect.
Speaker 1: And since the film and television industries have traditionally been
Speaker 1: absolutely certain that every pirated copy of a work represents
Speaker 1: a lost sale and thus lost revenue. Things that appear
Speaker 1: to help curtail piracy are highly valued. Now, I'm not
Speaker 1: gonna go into the logical fallacies behind piracy and lost sales,
Speaker 1: as that goes well beyond this discussion. But if you
Speaker 1: want to hear more about those ideas, I've got several
Speaker 1: episodes that touch on it in the archives. Anyway, the
Speaker 1: TV manufacturing companies were really behind three D tv s
Speaker 1: because you know, it created a reason for customers to
Speaker 1: go out and buy a new television. Let's face it,
Speaker 1: there are certain types of tech, like smartphones, for example,
Speaker 1: that companies have successfully marketed as a gadget that you
Speaker 1: need to replace every two to three years. Um. I
Speaker 1: think of this kind of like the directions on shampoo
Speaker 1: that's say, rents and repeat. At least I assume shampoo's
Speaker 1: still say that I haven't had hair in more than
Speaker 1: twenty years, so I don't look at shampoo bobbles anymore.
Speaker 1: There's I mean, there's just no reason right. So Anyway,
Speaker 1: the whole rents and repeat thing, I mean, do you
Speaker 1: need to rent and then repeat, well, you need to rentse,
Speaker 1: you need to get the soap out of your hair,
Speaker 1: but the repeat part probably you don't need to do that. However,
Speaker 1: it does mean that you would end up using the
Speaker 1: shampoo up twice as fast. That means you have to
Speaker 1: buy shampoo more frequently, and that means more money for
Speaker 1: big shampoo, big shampoo. It's kind of hard to set
Speaker 1: up that same kind of repeat business with folks buying television's.
Speaker 1: At least back in the day, the idea was, you know,
Speaker 1: you bought a TV and you pretty much stuck with
Speaker 1: it until it don't work no more, at which point
Speaker 1: you would either see if you could get it repaired,
Speaker 1: or you know, you would buckle down and buy a
Speaker 1: new one. In fact, that second one was, you know,
Speaker 1: sometimes preferable, because as often the repair costs would be
Speaker 1: about the same or maybe even more than buying a
Speaker 1: new TV. Now, the emergence of h D t V
Speaker 1: and the migration from analog TV to digital TV helped
Speaker 1: change that a little bit. But after h D t
Speaker 1: V came out, improvements in television were incremental or sometimes
Speaker 1: not even noticeable, like you were reduced to arguing that
Speaker 1: your television was better at reproducing colors, for example, but
Speaker 1: you couldn't otherwise show some sort of technological advantage that
Speaker 1: differentiated your TV from any of the other dozens of
Speaker 1: televisions that were coming out at that same time. So
Speaker 1: how do you create a demand for new televisions that
Speaker 1: reaches beyond the small percentage of folks who are either
Speaker 1: buying their very first TV or they're replacing, you know,
Speaker 1: a broken television. Well, you have to introduce new features,
Speaker 1: and three D was a new feature, one that companies
Speaker 1: hoped would catch on, and they pushed really hard. For
Speaker 1: about three years, you could not find a new TV
Speaker 1: in store that either wasn't three D or three D ready.
Speaker 1: It was pretty much a standard feature, and companies pushed
Speaker 1: hard to get people to adopt three D televisions. But
Speaker 1: there was a really big problem. Customers did not buy
Speaker 1: into the hype cycle, at least not like they had
Speaker 1: with other types of technology. See, most people didn't care
Speaker 1: for the idea of having to wear special glasses just
Speaker 1: to watch television, even if that TV had dynamite three
Speaker 1: D effects. It would mean having to keep track of
Speaker 1: yet more stuff, and in the case of active three
Speaker 1: D glasses, you would have to keep that stuff charged
Speaker 1: so that it works. The active three D glasses have
Speaker 1: little shutters and the lenses and they alternate, so like
Speaker 1: the left shutter is closed and the right shutter is open,
Speaker 1: and then they switch and they do this many many
Speaker 1: times a second. But in order to do that you
Speaker 1: have to actually charge the glasses. They are powered, their
Speaker 1: battery powered. So that proved to be too much for
Speaker 1: the market to bear, and adoption was low, and the
Speaker 1: skepticism in the press, particularly in the tech journalism field,
Speaker 1: was really high, and after a few years, manufacturers quietly
Speaker 1: phased out marketing three D television's. I mean that doesn't
Speaker 1: mean that there are no televisions out there that support
Speaker 1: three D these days, but rather that stopped being the
Speaker 1: feature that that companies like Panasonic and Sony were pushing.
Speaker 1: But man, they really did try and make a go
Speaker 1: of it for a few years. There was more than
Speaker 1: one c s I attended where these companies were really
Speaker 1: trying to make three D TV at talking point. So
Speaker 1: the hype cycle isn't necessarily a foregone conclusion. I'll explain
Speaker 1: more after we come back from this quick break. So
Speaker 1: not every technology is going to go through the hype
Speaker 1: cycle sequence, and certainly not every tech will ultimately reach
Speaker 1: the plateau of productivity. Some will just fade away. Uh.
Speaker 1: You know, here's the crazy thing. The merit of the
Speaker 1: technology itself doesn't necessarily play into whether it survives the
Speaker 1: hype cycle or not. There are technologies quote unquote out
Speaker 1: there that don't really do anything, that are essentially scams
Speaker 1: that make it through and become profitable and and persist.
Speaker 1: There are other technologies that arguably could be really useful
Speaker 1: that don't survive this cycle. So you have to keep
Speaker 1: in mind that surviving the hype cycle and being a
Speaker 1: good technology don't necessarily overlap perfectly. You have a much
Speaker 1: better chance of surviving the hype cycle if your technology
Speaker 1: has merit. It's just not a guarantee, and it's not
Speaker 1: a guarantee if your technology doesn't have merit that you
Speaker 1: won't survive. That's the fun thing about human beings. Some
Speaker 1: tech will enter that downward slope after they peek and
Speaker 1: never pull out the dive. Some might have a more
Speaker 1: gradual path from the point of introduction to the point
Speaker 1: where they proved to be productive, but they don't have
Speaker 1: dramatic highs and lows like it's not a technology that's
Speaker 1: considered to be so sexy that they go through the
Speaker 1: crazy hype cycle and then the trough of disillusionment. They
Speaker 1: might have a more steady path from point A to
Speaker 1: point B, with point B being the plateau of productivity.
Speaker 1: But for certain technologies, we definitely can look at how
Speaker 1: they emerged and plot them against this sort of general observation,
Speaker 1: and that brings us back to the metaverse. I would
Speaker 1: say we're still headed toward the peak of inflated expectations
Speaker 1: at this point. We're still in that initial crazy hype
Speaker 1: phase which has been pushed primarily by companies like Meta
Speaker 1: Slash Facebook. However, at least some media outlets have not
Speaker 1: butt into the hype and have not pushed that further,
Speaker 1: pushed that narrative toward that peak um and they have
Speaker 1: offered up a more level headed perspective. I would say
Speaker 1: that the tech journalism side in particular has taken a
Speaker 1: more realistic, or if you prefer, cynical view of the metaverse.
Speaker 1: I count myself in that field. By the way, when
Speaker 1: I say cynical, I'm not I'm not saying that they're wrong,
Speaker 1: because I fully agree with them. Uh, they point out
Speaker 1: that we just we don't even have a definition for
Speaker 1: what the metaverse really is. We've got a lot of
Speaker 1: competing definitions out there, so we we definitely don't have
Speaker 1: a clear path to get into the metaverse because we
Speaker 1: don't even all agree on what the metaverse is. Outlets
Speaker 1: like The Verge have published some really great pieces about this,
Speaker 1: and once you start to straight outside of tech journalism,
Speaker 1: that's where reporting can get a little more loosey goosey.
Speaker 1: You typically see this in places where the person who's
Speaker 1: presenting the piece doesn't actually have a tech background, and
Speaker 1: they're primarily repeating bullet points that might be laid out
Speaker 1: in marketing literature. This is another issue we see a
Speaker 1: lot in I mean, it's it's you can't really call
Speaker 1: it journalism at that point, right, but we see it
Speaker 1: done a lot of blogs that cover tech where the
Speaker 1: blogger is essentially regurgitating a bullet list that was presented
Speaker 1: by some PR firm to cover a technology and they're
Speaker 1: not applying any kind of critical thinking or independent research
Speaker 1: or any kind of investigative journalism to it at all.
Speaker 1: They're just presenting the bullet points practically as is, and
Speaker 1: They're just elevating that that message, which again may not
Speaker 1: be reflective of reality. Uh, and that's how they play
Speaker 1: into that hype cycle. Metaverse. I'm not seeing that as much,
Speaker 1: and I think a big part of that actually has
Speaker 1: nothing to do with the concept of the metaverse itself,
Speaker 1: but rather the growing distrust in Facebook you know now meta.
Speaker 1: So there's this growing distrust in that company and of
Speaker 1: Mark Zuckerberg in particular, and I think that is playing
Speaker 1: way more into the narrative than necessarily the concept of
Speaker 1: the metaverse itself. Uh. Even so, though even if you
Speaker 1: remove Facebook from this this entire you know equation, I'm
Speaker 1: still pretty skeptical that we're going to see a metaverse
Speaker 1: in you know, the near future. I mentioned last week
Speaker 1: in a tech News episode of Tech Stuff that there
Speaker 1: was a blog post written by Intel's Rajah Kaduri. He's
Speaker 1: the senior VP of Intel's Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics
Speaker 1: group and could dury estimates that in order to support
Speaker 1: a metaverse akin to something that you might see in
Speaker 1: science fiction like Ready Player one, that it's going to
Speaker 1: require something like a thousand times more computing power or
Speaker 1: than what we have at our disposal today that includes processing, storage,
Speaker 1: um networking infrastructure. All of that's going to have to
Speaker 1: be considerably more powerful than what we have today in
Speaker 1: order to support the version of the metaverse that a
Speaker 1: lot of people are talking about, this idea of this
Speaker 1: persistent and pervasive virtual world that ties in with our
Speaker 1: physical world in some meaningful way. We just aren't there yet.
Speaker 1: And in fact this is you know, kind of proven
Speaker 1: by the fact that most of the virtual environments that
Speaker 1: are kind of the proto version of the metaverse that
Speaker 1: we have today are incredibly limited and primitive. They might
Speaker 1: be limited to something like twenty or fewer participants in
Speaker 1: a given space. Well that's not that's not a metaverse, right,
Speaker 1: That's not what you think of when you hear the
Speaker 1: word metaverse, you do. You think of interconnected worlds that
Speaker 1: you can move in between easily and that can have
Speaker 1: hunt ards of thousands of people in it. Well, we're
Speaker 1: nowhere close to that, and so we're not likely to
Speaker 1: see a version of the metaverse that even closely resembles
Speaker 1: what's being marketed in in in the near future. Also,
Speaker 1: the VR and A r ideations of the metaverse are
Speaker 1: going to require people to invest a significant amount of
Speaker 1: money into hardware in order to access those services. You know,
Speaker 1: virtual reality has gone through the hype cycle a couple
Speaker 1: of times, like I mentioned, and there is you know,
Speaker 1: a customer base for virtual reality, but it's still pretty small.
Speaker 1: So right now, those would be the people who would
Speaker 1: arguably have the hardware that might allow them to access this,
Speaker 1: although that's not clear either. It may be that by
Speaker 1: the time we actually have a quote unquote metaverse available,
Speaker 1: the tech we have today, like the hardware like VR
Speaker 1: sets and stuff, won't be up to the task. We
Speaker 1: don't know. I mean, if you want to have an
Speaker 1: untethered experi ants, that's gonna cost you more, obviously, So
Speaker 1: that's gonna limit the audience for the metaverse to people
Speaker 1: who can afford it. So you're gonna have haves and
Speaker 1: have nots, right because they're going to be people who
Speaker 1: just can't go out and purchase a computer system and
Speaker 1: VR hardware and are hardware to be able to experience it.
Speaker 1: So you're gonna have a digital divide based on you know,
Speaker 1: economic status. Beyond that, presumably everyone who can afford it,
Speaker 1: not not all of them will be interested in it, right,
Speaker 1: Like there's gonna be people who actually could technically afford
Speaker 1: to access the metaverse who might not have any reason
Speaker 1: to do so, so they don't have any you know,
Speaker 1: impetus to get involved. So that means that the percentage
Speaker 1: of people who will want to and be able to
Speaker 1: access the metaverse will be pretty limited. It might be
Speaker 1: so limited that it doesn't go anywhere. So there are
Speaker 1: a lot of reasons to doubt that the metaverse is
Speaker 1: going to come along at least any time in the
Speaker 1: near future. It may be inevitable, but we're talking about
Speaker 1: a much longer timeline than what is typically presented to
Speaker 1: us through marketing pushes. So it's something that we need
Speaker 1: to keep in mind. I think the hype cycle, while
Speaker 1: you know it's it's again not universal. We can't apply
Speaker 1: to every single technology, not all of them participated in
Speaker 1: the hype cycle at the same pace as everything else. Right,
Speaker 1: There's some things that over the course of many years
Speaker 1: went through this process, and somewhere maybe it's over the
Speaker 1: course of a year and a half um But I
Speaker 1: think it's useful for us to think of in the
Speaker 1: in the sense of keeping ourselves grounded when something new
Speaker 1: is debuting, and to remember the promises that are being
Speaker 1: made early on may not at all come to pass,
Speaker 1: and that it's okay to be excited with new technology.
Speaker 1: It's okay to be interested in new technology. If you're
Speaker 1: an early adopter. It's okay to adopt that technology as
Speaker 1: long as you're doing so with the knowledge that it
Speaker 1: might not live up to the hype, and that could
Speaker 1: be okay. As long as there is you know, a
Speaker 1: good use case for it, then it's okay. If it
Speaker 1: doesn't live up to the hype, it's okay if it
Speaker 1: it has uh returns, they're not nearly as grand as
Speaker 1: long as everyone's willing to, you know, take that chill
Speaker 1: pill and and go forward with a more level headed approach.
Speaker 1: The issue is that we often don't see that happen.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's why the hype cycle was even uh
Speaker 1: something that you could say is a thing. You know,
Speaker 1: that's a trend that we've seen happen many times, that
Speaker 1: history repeats itself. That people get caught up in these
Speaker 1: ideas and they drum up the hype and they also
Speaker 1: drum up the disappointment when the hype fails to match reality.
Speaker 1: This is something that we're probably gonna keep on seeing.
Speaker 1: But as individuals, if we're aware of it, we can
Speaker 1: limit its effect on ourselves, elves, and maybe on people
Speaker 1: with that we care about, so that they don't, you know,
Speaker 1: put all their money in f t s for example.
Speaker 1: Al Right, well, I hope you found this episode about
Speaker 1: the hype cycle interesting. I really love talking about it
Speaker 1: because I do think it's a useful tool to to
Speaker 1: kind of examine really marketing trends in tech more than
Speaker 1: tech itself, and it allows me to look back on
Speaker 1: my own history with tech and see the times where
Speaker 1: I bought in to the hype and times where I
Speaker 1: felt truly disillusioned by the realities of tech, and of
Speaker 1: course also the times where I bought into the tech
Speaker 1: after it has gone through that cycle because I couldn't
Speaker 1: afford to do it before that, so I bought it
Speaker 1: when I knew what the tech could and could not do,
Speaker 1: not because I was smart, but because I was poor. Anyway,
Speaker 1: I hope you enjoyed that episode. If you have suggestions
Speaker 1: for topics I should cover tech stuff, reach out to me.
Speaker 1: The best way to do that is on Twitter. The
Speaker 1: handle for the show is text stuff h s W
Speaker 1: and I'll talk to you again really soon. Yeah. Text
Speaker 1: Stuff is an I heart Radio production. For more podcasts
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