Bleeding edge technology is a category of technologies so new that they could have a high risk of being unreliable and lead adopters to incur greater expense in order to make use of them.
The term bleeding edge was formed as an allusion to the similar terms “leading edge” and “cutting edge”. It tends to imply even greater advancement, albeit at an increased risk because of the unreliability of the software or hardware.
The first documented example of this term being used dates to early 1983.
