The software industry is primarily driven by hype bubbles. Terms like IoT, AI, SaaS, SOA, Bigdata - these are all marketing campaigns designed to inflate one bubble or another. But if they are marketing campaigns who is driving them and why?

I think the answer lies in the marriage between computer engineer and business. This combination was exemplified in the early days of Apple with the partnership between the two Steve's.

If you want your tech product to sell well you need two equally important things: 1) it has to be useful 2) it has to be marketed.

Without some form of marketing people will either never hear of your product, or they will be able to understand it. Understanding it means slotting it into some existing concept that they can relate to.

A key aspect of people hearing about your product is investment. You want people with spare cash looking for a place to grow it to be able to understand how it fits into their mental model.

This is how a skilled marketing department can coin a term like "Bigdata" and have it grow into an industry. As the brand builds people want to hitch a ride on the brand and it gathers its own momentum, hopefully growing into a hype bubble - everyone will have an IoT in their lightbulbs one day, right?