Andrew Anker at VentureBlog suggests in Accelerating Acceleration that technology adoption life cycles are compressing. Alex Pang at FutureBlog summarizes the points:

-The product uptake curve is accelerating
-The laggard market is disappearing
-New products will either open big or get killed early
-It's not about technology any more
-Early adopters will become a big enough group to serve on their own

Although I agree that that this may be happening in information technology related products and services (Andrew's examples are specifically consumer electronics -- DVD players, movies, Internet usage, Tivo), it is far from any general acceleration across all markets.

Just spend a minute with Derek Lowe as he discusses the continuing difficulties facing the pharmaceutical industry to see how technology adoption and diffusion is not accelerating everywhere. Instead, we are observing what economist Brian Arthur described as the coming information technology build-out.

By taking a broader historical view, as developed by Carlota Perez in her seminal work, Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital, we can see that we are nearing the fourth and final stage of the information technology wave. Indeed, it is by taking this longer term perspective that it is possible to see that within the next decade we'll be entering the neurotechnology wave, where NBIC technologies will converge creating entirely new markets with many of the same old adoption life cycle attributes.