Hype

Posted on Feb 10, 2026

The fashion industry is the only industry more hype based than IT. Some IT hypes in no particular order:

Consumer facing / Interfaces

Smart Homes / Smart appliances / Internet of things (Smart fridges, smart tv, Google Nest, etc)
remote game streaming (Google’s Stadia)
single sign-on (OAUTH2 providers, Open-ID, Open Social, etc)
iBeacons
5G hype
everything must be search based
Flying cars (helicopters, but without the problems of helicopters, like noise, air displacement and crashes)
VR / metaverse ( second life, but without the problems of secondlife)
mobile apps for everything
3D TV/movies
everything must be tag based (don’t forget to have a tag-cloud!)
Java applets / ActiveX
bitcoin / shitcoins
DeFi
Flash (and Silverlight)
MS’s cable TV set-top box
closed internet networks (The Microsoft Network, KPNnet, AOL, Compuserve)
Personal Area Network (PAN)
Classmates / Six-Degrees / LiveJournal / Friendster / MySpace / Google Orkut / Facebook.com / Google+ and Circles (social websites are like clubs: once they become popular, the cool kids find a new place, and the old place becomes a ghost town)
Augmented Reality
The Long Tail (e-commerce)
Active Desktop (Windows 98: everything is a web-page)
Active Channels (push technology) in 1998, Browser Pop-Ups (1997 - 2007 ), CSS Pop-Ups (now), HTTP push notification (now) .. advertisers: nobody wants to receive your spam
E-book readers (useful, but a small market)
NFT’s (another desperate, scammer hyped attempt to find a non-existing problem for the Blockchain solution)
3D scanners and printers (3D printers are popular, but only for builders - we don’t have one in every home)
Slashdot / Digg (social news)

The lessons learned should be that people like to express themself in video and writing and like to communicate with other (like-minded) people. If the platform used encourages social group behavior, then those platforms are often only hip for a limited time, just like nightclubs. People do not like to interact through avatars or cartoons. They do not like spam or aggressive marketing. It is possible to create entirely new markets, but most successful online services basically mirror normal offline behavior, and then scale it up + add discover-ability. Also: hardware is inflexible, expensive and hardly ever drives new social behavior, with the notable exception of smartphones.

As a consumer you would have been fine with buying a normal notebook since the keyboard + mouse/trackpad enable you to do real work, while buying a smartphone for on-the-fly mobile stuff when outdoors. All other stuff so far has mostly been a distraction. You would have been better of by staying away from “social networks”, while using simple tools (Signal, Whats-App) to stay in contact with a limited group of people. If you have something to say, it would and is still best to own a domainname and link it to some (paid) online blog service to prevent lock-in.

Core IT

web3 (semantic web)
intranet (you must be a bit older to remember this one)
ORM’s (why bother to write simple SQL queries when a ORM can create unreadable, undebuggable and extremely inefficient SQL?)
SRE (cattle not pets!)
everything must be Ajax ( XML-RPC before everybody switched to json)
everything must be JSON in data exchange (ongoing)
REST APIs
Electron-based apps
YAML for everything! (basically: readable XML)
Dual (pair) programming / Extreme Programming
Unified messaging (SMS, Email, etc. all in one server)
WebASM (the most usable browser technology that nobody uses)
XML-RPC / SOAP for everything
everything must be a wiki
Quantum Computing (ongoing)
IBM Lotus notes
Multicloud, Public / Private cloud
Agile
MS Frontpage Extensions
Everything P2P (Peer 2 Peer)
NoSQL databases
Casandra (database)
MongoDB (NoSQL document based databases)
Open Data
webdav
Functional Programming
Mesh networking
NodeJS
The Net PC
Java consoles (SUN)
UML coding
virtual networks
AMP
everything in the Cloud
2FA for every app
BYD (Bring Your own Device, not the car maker)
PWA apps
Blockchain / web3 (name hijacked from the semantic web, but completely unrelated)
LoRa
expert systems (prolog, etc)
SOA
Edge computing
WiMAX
IaaS / SaaS
XML everything, also XSL
Frameworks (after RubyOnRails everybody went nuts)
everything in containers / Kubernetes
server-less computing
SPA’s
big data / data lakes
ORB’s
micro-services
DevOps
AI for everything? Remember: The “i” in “LLM” stands for intelligence!

Some hypes left useful things that are now part of the regular IT landscape. But it is important to remember that if you as a company sticked with simply having a monorepo web-application + SQL (with some JavaScript sprinkled on top were it made sense), running on some beefy servers you would have been fine (as long as you remember to refresh the look every other year, and have your marketing drop some buzzwords every other post).

If you want more proof, look at Wikipedia https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_servers, they basically still run a LAMP stack (but with load-balancers and static content caching) and serve more traffic then you ever will.

The effective technology has not changed much. But the hype is always changing.