Blindly following a trend will likely not end well. But even with previous hype cycles, those companies that identified good use cases, validated those use cases, and had solid execution of the projects leaped ahead. Big Data was genuinely of value to plenty of organizations, and a waste of time for others. IoT was crazy for plenty of orgs ... but also was really valuable to certain segments. Gartner's hype cycle ends with the plateau of productivity for a reason ... you just have to go through the trough of disillusionment first, which is going to come from a the great multitudes of failed and ill-conceived projects.