We work in the web development industry, and so we love our shiny new stuff! Don’t we? We love our chrome-plated glowy neon high-tech toys, because they make us feel like the hero in a Tron movie.

web-developmentOhhh, it’s exhausting keeping that up. But anyway, as painful as it will be to live through, we’re starting to see lots of enthusiastic hype for HTML5, which means that it will come to pass. It works this way because the life-cycle of all new web tech runs like this:

  • Initial spec. Somebody like Tim Berners-Lee or Paul Graham makes a blog post about it; everybody laughs.
  • First implementation. Some bright little start-up implements it before its time and it falls over. All the big companies sniff over it and turn their nose up at it.
  • A handful of bright bloggers keep yammering about it and why we should give it a chance.

  • A few more take up the march, but now they’re posting demos with amazing things happening. Start-ups form. The first dollar is earned from it.
  • Suddenly the whole tech world goes crazy for it! People can’t hype hype hype it enough! The buzz becomes buzzwords, hype, overkill, and burnout. An investor bubble forms around it and bursts.

Yeah, think it over. Look at past examples. Cloud computing, Web 2.0, text messaging, RSS, SaaS… isn’t it always in that pattern?