Twitter Poll Results: Most disappointing technology hype

I did a weeklong Twitter poll on the most disappointing and overhyped technology trends of the past 10 years. Even with 219 votes, this informal survey ended with a virtual tie:

So what went wrong for the “winners” of the poll - 3D printing (33%) and Virtual Reality (32%)? The VR and 3D printing technologies that live up to the hype are still just too expensive to be things the average consumer would have at home. VR is in use for flight sims that cost millions of dollars. 3D printing has found a serious niche in industrial settings where dropping tens of thousands of dollars on one printer is a reasonable capital expense. If you’re in aerospace or manufacturing these technologies are transforming your world, but they’re still somewhere in the future at the household level because doing them well is too expensive.

Blockchain technology (26%) was a different type of failure. Blockchain’s advocates are not waiting for one more miracle for their pet product to work correctly. Using blockchain doesn’t require buying expensive physical hardware and having the space to store it. The problem with blockchain has always been a question of who is using it. Blockchain became associated with the cynical use of buzzwords in PowerPoint slides on one end of the spectrum and outright fraud on the other via ICO scams. This kills its applicability in financial use cases because all financial systems are necessarily systems of trust.

The Internet of Things (IoT) was not really viewed as the same level of failure with only 9% of the survey. I did a follow-up poll to inquiry into people’s reasons for choosing something else.

What I found was that people either viewed the technology to be commercially successful or their opinions of IoT and smart devices had soured to the point where they were no longer disappoi nted. One person lamented in the comments that most of the IoT hardware they have seen comes from established large companies and not from startups. However the landfills are full of IoT products from startups that created a hot gadget and then abandoned support for it 3-5 years later. The lifespan of a consumer product can be a lot longer than the lifespan of the ability of a small company to continue supporting it, and that makes the economics of the IoT challenging for any but the largest of technology companies.

So, what’s the bottom line? A shift in the economics of producing VR/3D printing gear or in supporting IoT hardware could still make those things “happen” for mainstream use in the future. Blockchain faces a tougher road forward because its initial advocates poisoned the well for everyone else and destroyed consumer trust in the technology.

I remain the most optimistic about 3D printing - I think it’s possible to get started at the household level for about $500 today. The printers that are reputed to be good and enable someone to get started with materials and all the “stuff” at that price point are, notably, all sold out or backordered. So I’ve been unable to test this hypothesis (yet).