Every member of the board of OpenSource Science can flawlessly name the IT hypes of the last 35 years, and tell the tale. In this blog we want to explain how huge and important technical innovations are hijacked and misused by commercial pirates and how you can protect yourself against this. First we will talk about major developments, next about the misuse and at last how you can protect your business against this.
1994 Global breakthrough of Internet and Web technologies.
After the internet came to live by the fusion of ARPA Net and EU net in 1982, the traction was forming. With the development of the WWW and the first browser in 1989 the seed really was sown. Everything open source, but there was no discussion about that. In 1994 started the real rise of the WWW and the amount of users started to grow exponentially. Nobody knew how to create a website and every company wanted a website, so opportunist grabbed the moment and named themselves web designers and started to make money. Lots of money.
1999 - 2001 Millennium bug and Euro conversion
In 1999 it seemed that all computers needed to be tested if they were able to resist the date entry into the new millennium. All applications needed to be tested to see if they were able to make the cross to the new year. What happened in reality that there was a misuse of time and effort and thus money. With trucks companies were emptied of their computers, which were then returned after a week of intensive testing. Testing, which in most cases took only 5 minutes per computer. More or less the same happened in 2001 when the European Union went live which it's united currency, the Euro.
2008 Bitcoin and Blockchain technologies
The emergence of Bitcoin and Blockchain technology, which was a huge technological and financial innovation, led to a Blockchain hype. All kind of 'specialists' emerged, governments and companies were driven to find problems which they could solve with the blockchain, which is of course the wrong way. Do not understand us wrong, we love Blockchain, but only if it is used as a solution for a suitable problem. Not as a technology which has to be used because it's the best for all world problems. Again, companies misused the lack of knowledge within companies and their urge to join on the hype train, for which they happily paid too much.
2014 Big Data
While first seen as a threat, the tides turned quick, especially after the Target incident, in which the Target company used data science to predict pregnancies of customers, which led to a huge profit surge. The result was that the whole retail world wanted to jump on the hype train. Which to some extent happened. Again, specialists arose to make money, lots of money. And of course a lot of these projects failed.
2024 - 2025 The Gen AI hype
You knew it was coming, right? After surviving the previous paragraphs, one could guess, AI was coming. Do you see a trend? Every time a breakthrough emerges, it is misused by people to make money. This time the problem is bigger, not only because most companies are not DATA mature enough to profit really from gen AI, but also because gen AI companies use your data without consent. This time the hype seems bigger than ever. But this time the problem is bigger than ever. To really have an advantage of gen AI technologies, you need a good and profound data architecture, with a nearly perfect data quality. Because if you put shit in, you get shit out. So to mitigate this problem, first start working on your data management, data architecture and data quality before you invite a fake specialist to take your money.
Protecting yourself, the solution of the hype problem
Somehow, if you look at the board of companies or at representatives in governments, they often lack of people which have some technological background. Easily influenced by sales people, they seem very vulnerable to the hype train. An easy solution would be, to make sure you have people with some knowledge in your board or government, and start listening to them, they know better than the sales people. For us, it's incomprehensible that CEO's, make decisions about stuff they have absolutely zip zero knowledge about. Decisions about stuff which is alien to everybody in the board. Stuff where only this expensive consultant from company xyz seems to have some knowledge about. Surround yourself with honest people which know their stuff!
Another important tip to protect your self, is to switch to open source. With Foss you always have the opportunity to study the source code and see what's happening, next there is no chance on a vendor lock-in. But we are sure you read some of our other blogs, so this is no news to you. Next, Foss communities and or companies seem to be a little more honest. Not that they don't want to sell you anything, but at least that they don't want to sell you a technology which is of no use to you, because your architecture is not mature enough.