John the Factotum

Chipotle

an image of a guy on stage hyping a crowd

There was a time in the United States - maybe 15 year ago? - when a restaurant couldn't call themselves a restaurant unless there was something featured on the menu that involved chipotle. You had to have something. It could be the Kung Pow Chipotle Face Smash Burrito with chipotle fire sauce diapers to wear through the ordeal or a chocolate shake with chipotle drizzle...and then you'd walk into 7-11 and they'd have the Chipotle Head-exploder Icee on tap. It was out of control. There are still remnants of this craze in a lot of restaurants. Though, if you didn't live through it, it's hard to really understand. For some reason, this word, "chipotle", somehow gained traction and marketers and product developers went berzerk trying to cash in on the craze...to great effect. The funny thing is that chipotle was a tasty food long before this craze. Somehow it just got hyped.

The same phenomenon has happened in the tech industry many times over - even just in the relatively short span of my career. Let's talk about them...

The Cloud #

The Cloud was this magical place that you could send your code and all of your problems would be solved. Everything was going to be so easy! Shockingly enough, that wasn't true. The cloud did, in fact, solve a lot of problems. It was, and continues to be, a very useful tool. But all it really did was [sorta] obscure the complexity that comes with finely controlling dynamic scale in hosted environments. One of my favorite nerdy T-shirts says "There is no cloud. It's just somebody else's computer." That T-shirt is 100% true.

QR Codes #

When QR codes first hit the scene for marketing use, they were everywhere...and barely anyone knew how to use them. The reason is because you had to download a stand-alone app on your phone to scan them. It took until 2017 for the iPhone to have native capabilities to recognize QR codes in the camera app. QR codes were born in 1994. The iPhone was born in 2007. That means that there was 13 years of QR codes, mostly in industrial use, before anything consumer-oriented could possibly use them. Then marketers heard that we had the capability to use them and went crazy sticking them on everything. They were ubiquitous for nearly a decade before anyone's grandmother could actually use them. Now, of course, they've been accepted for their utility, and generally I've found that they get used for things like "scan this to see the manual for this tool you just bought". But for a while it was "scan this thing and give us your information to be entered into a contest for socks"...except that only 10 people knew how to do it.

IoT #

The Internet of Things was supposed to make it so that we could automate the world. It was the greatest value-unlock since we figured out internal combustion engines. We could communicate with tiny, simple machines with broad distribution, making the world around us like a digitally-enabled extension of human perception and reaction. SO. MUCH. BUSINESS. VALUE. Except...it wasn't. Don't get me wrong. There were use cases where IoT concepts were super useful. But it certainly wasn't everything. And it was non-trivial to manage, to say the least. The cost/benefit was hard to justify for the vast majority of cases.

Blockchain #

If you're not in tech, "blockchain" may not be familiar, but I'll bet Bitcoin and "crypto" are. Blockchain is what powers Bitcoin and all the other crypto-things you've dreamed about in your get-rich-quick schemes. But blockchain itself isn't the cryptocurrency that you think can use to hide your business transactions. Blockchain is simply a way to describe a distributed ledger and a way to verify that the transactions being recorded in that ledger are legitimate, creating a permanent record. There are plenty of good uses for blockchain technology. But there was a chipotle-like explosion of "blockchain all the things!" in the late 20-teens. I can't tell you how many startups that had NUH-THING to do with anything ledger-oriented that were trying to pitch investors on their advanced blockchain tech. It was embarrassing. And this is not the last time that blockchain will come up in this list...

Machine Learning #

Actually, this was a pretty good one. Machine learning has been around a while, and it's a little unfair to say that it enjoyed the same hysteria as chipotle. It started gaining popularity and driving a lot of folks toward data science as a career, which was helpful. And it's actually pretty cool and useful. The main reason it made this list is because the term "learning" is a stretch. You'll also hear the word "training" with relation to machine learning. We tend to use words to describe the world around us that we can relate to, even if they aren't entirely accurate.

Web3 #

And blockchain returns! Web3 was HUGE for a minute with NFTs, those stupid digital images that people bought for bajillions of dollars like digital beanie babies, speculating that they were the next Bitcoin. To some extent, they kind of were the next Bitcoin for just a moment, and a lot of folks made a lot of money. Once again, though, we were led to believe one thing by the hype without fully understanding the underlying ideas behind the tech. The idea was that we could use blockchain to authenticate and attribute ownership of digital content. This is actually a really big deal in the world of content publishing that has moved almost entirely to digital distribution. There are still quite a few platforms out there using the concepts of Web3 to great effect. You can still trade NFTs. Shockingly the revolution was smaller and slower than the hype would have us believe.

Artificial Intelligence #

So we come to present day: Artificial Intelligence. The dawn of a new era, right? Maybe. Maybe not. Generative AI certainly has shown utility in a lot of areas. I've used it extensively for ideation, content generation, and coding. I once wrote a blog that would write an automated post once per day using OpenAI. I've also spent just as much time debugging and de-bunking AI generated content as I would have writing it myself. Let's be clear: It is NOT intelligence. AI is just code and data that, given an input, uses probability to generate an output that you will perceive as "thinking". I often use the phrase "perception is reality". From that point of view, the LLMs are intelligent to many people. It's like magic. The truth is that it's mostly because somebody clever seeded the idea by calling the product "intelligence" and then created an echo chamber to drive up company valuations. Deepseek R1? It's hot garbage (functionally speaking) that was announced right before Chinese New Year when nobody would be in the office the next day. My best guess is that somebody made a bunch of money shorting US tech stocks.

My advice? #

Don't be jaded by the hype cycle, but recognize it for what it is: Time (i.e. attention) is money. Marketers know this well. Be curious enough and go deep enough to understand what has value and in what context. Figure out if there are any practical use cases for new technology that add value to your customers. But don't spend your time chasing shiny objects. You'll just live in a constant state of distraction trying to hang out with people you perceive to be the cool kids. Ask yourself: Am I losing customers because I'm not ___? Odds are the answer is "no" when you fill in the blank with most new tech. So invest wisely and incrementally as you see real results. Don't grab a solution looking for a problem when you already have more than enough problems to solve with basic execution.