I find it fascinating how technology fads work. When cool new technology graduates from laboratory to alpha stage release, it gets celebrated as if it was ready for enterprise-scale deployment. By the time it hits beta (and is clearly still not ready for enterprise-scale deployment) it gets lambasted for not being good enough. Once it finally hits enterprise-scale capability the crowd will finally judge it on its merits.
Blockchain is currently going through this cycle. It’s been around for a decade so it seems like it should be mature but the reality is that developers and companies are still only just figuring out its possible uses. Yet somehow it is already being regularly written off as a failed technology that will never add business value.
This may seem a strange topic coming from someone in the CRE space where Hadoop may finally make a real appearance in another 10 years (our cycle is waaaaaaaaay behind every other industry). Technology matures at different rates in different industries. The use cases for real estate are very different than the use cases in Finance or Retail or Operations. Big Data means something VERY different to CRE than it does to Facebook.
All this to say, just because something has a little age or there’s a shiny new toy in the market, doesn’t mean that the older tools have no place. I still encounter industry tools where a SQL backend would be a significant upgrade.
