Murphy's PR Hype Cycle

Analysts get a pleasing name-check on the PR Hype Cycle. This is the invention of our Tom Murphy, who writes PR Opinions when he's not collecting frequent flyer points jetting between here and his home in Dublin.

This is an entertaining diagram, but it gives us a couple of thoughts - not only about Tom's chart but also about the Hype Cycle in general.

It's very interesting that Visibility is Gartner's axis, alongside time. The more I look at Hype Cycles, I am sure that the results are totally subjective. Looking at the Time axis, for example, items tend to be charted neither in the order of their invention, nor of their arrival on the 'Plateau' but rather their mainstream acceptance by mature market players. For example, email is way more visible than VNR.

Nor, indeed, are items in the 'Peak of Inflated Expectations' necessarily over-inflated. Gartner says that RFID and smartphones are there at the moment, but both those technologies are delivering a lot of value to the agressive early adoptors that use them.

However, looking at a few other Hype Cycles, we've also noticed a great feature, which is the indication of how long something will take to each maturity, if at all. Some things on Gartner's Hype Cycles just drop down dead, the way that fax has.