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Key Takeaways Innovation moves slower than public attention — that’s why new technology trends always sound overhyped.
If you don’t answer consumers’ questions early, the general public will fill the gap for you — and once a public narrative forms, it’s hard to deviate from it.
So instead of waiting until your new tech is out, craft the narrative early on.
Every major technology wave follows the same pattern.
First comes the excitement. A new category appears, capital starts flowing and founders talk about how an entire industry is finally about to get rebuilt. For a while, it genuinely feels like the start of something.
Then the skepticism creeps in, fast.
A few years later, that same technology gets written off as overhyped. The conversation shifts from “this will change everything” to “okay, but what actually changed?” What makes that cycle interesting is that the technology usually is improving during that window. Infrastructure matures. Products get better. Adoption spreads quietly into places the public rarely notices. The system keeps moving. The perception just doesn’t.
Innovation moves slower than attention
In my last piece, I wrote about the three phases most industries move through: visibility, interface and incentives. Visibility makes a system easier to see; information that used to live behind professional gatekeepers becomes accessible. Interface improves how people actually interact with it. Incentives are where the real restructuring happens, when pricing models shift and control moves to different participants.
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