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Crossing The Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers (Paperback)
by Geoffrey Moore
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Marketing, Sales, Strategy, Hi-tech |
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A never-out-of-date classic for the library of every technology marketing executive. |
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Author: Geoffrey Moore
Publisher: Collins; Revised edition
Pub. in: August, 2002
ISBN: 0060517123
Pages: 256
Measurements: 8.2 x 5.3 x 0.6 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA00125
Other information: ISBN-13: 978-0060517120
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- Awards & Credential -
One of the best known classics on high-tech marketing, from the famed expert in this field. |
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- MSL Picks -
Crossing the Chasm (1991) and Inside the Tornado (1995) should be read in combination. Having just re-read both, I consider them even more valuable now than when they were first published. Chasm "is unabashedly about and for marketing within high-tech enterprises." It was written for the entire high tech community "to open up the marketing decision making during this [crossing] period so that everyone on the management team can participate in the marketing process." In Chasm, Moore isolates and then corrects what he describes as a "fundamental flaw in the prevailing high-tech marketing model": the notion that rapid mainstream growth could follow continuously on the heels of early market success.
In his subsequent book, Inside the Tornado, Moore's use of the "tornado" metaphor correctly suggests that turbulence of unprecedented magnitude has occurred within the global marketplace which the WWW and the Internet have created. Moreover, such turbulence is certain to intensify. Which companies will survive? Why? I have only one (minor) quarrel with the way these two books have been promoted. True, they provide great insights into marketing within the high technology industry. However, in my opinion, all e-commerce (especially B2B and, even more importantly, B2B2C) will be centrally involved in that industry. Moreover, the marketing strategies suggested are relevant to virtually (no pun intended) any organization - regardless of size or nature - which seeks to create or increase demand for what it sells... whatever that may be. I consider both books "must reading." Those who share my high regard for one or both are strongly urged to read Moore's more recent business classic, Living on the Fault Line.
Moore's primary point in this book is that the early adopters of a technology are not necessarily the same as the mainstream market. Moore points out that early adapters often buy things because they're cool, not for practical reasons. Early adapters deal with pain in the form of bad interfaces, minimal network effects. etc. Following this informal observation, Moore divides the population into innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards. This is his "Technology Adoption Life Cycle", of which the "underlying thesis is that technology is absorbed into any given community in stages corresponding to the psychological and social profiles of various segments within that market" (p. 15). He illustrates this with a bell curve with a horizontal axis corresponding to time of adoption. There's no explanation for why a Bell curve; I'm guessing it just looks pretty in PowerPoint. Moore continues with "this process can be thought of as a continuum with definite stages, each associated with a definable group" (p. 15), although actual definitions are notable by their absence. So Moore advises us that marketing to the two groups might have to be different. Complex? No. Obvious? Perhaps. In any case, this observation is followed with 185 pages of examples and pep talks which I found perfectly readable, but without much additional content.
The second point, which is really just as important, is that the way to "cross the chasm" is by targeting a single industry or group of users, a so-called "vertical market". The only way customers who are beyond the early adopter phase are going to buy into a new product is if it is easy to adopt or if it truly fills a perceived desperate need. That is, it looks less "disruptive". Usually this means a lot of custom integration with industry-specific infrastructure. It's easier to build something well integrated with existing, for say, just the airline industry and their SABRE database backend, than it is to try to target the entire Fortune 500, each sector of which has adopted different sorts of databases. It worked just the way Moore described for my company, where Moore's book was required reading.
You can get much more insight about sales and marketing (as well as finance and logistics) about disruptive technologies from Clayton Christensen's excellent The Innovator's Dilemma. You can learn more about marketing segmentation and network effects from Shapiro and Varian's "Information Rules". I might be biased as both a techie and a recovering academic, but I liked the more heavily researched, serious case-study orientation as well as the precise, restrained, academic tone of these two books from business professors. On the other hand, Moore's book gives you an excellent feel for the seat of the pants consulting and hype side of the business world, which itself is a useful education.
Moore's book is breezy and highly readable. This is great can't-sleep-on-the-airplane material. And two good ideas are more than you get out of most pop business books.
This book is absolutely amazing. I'm really knocking myself on the head for not purchasing it a long time ago, but I'm glad I did now. Currently, I'm Chairman and CEO for a new high-tech startup and after reading this book, I'm going to redesign our approach to marketing with my other officers. Even though we have not hit the chasm period, we will soon and I feel we are better prepared.
The book is actually very simple. It just defines what the chasm period is, who is involved, how to define what markets to attack, how to direct your marketing/advertising, how to assemble alliances and partners and even how to prepare your staff during this period.
The author does an excellent job being honest and sincere, explaining the good with the bad. This is truly great as he won't leave your company in the dust when you see big problems after when crossing and after you cross the chasm period. For instance, I would not have thought my pioneer sales staff would be not as effective and slightly frustrated after we have breached into the mainstream market. After Geoffrey's discussion on compensation and staffing after crossing the chasm, I was convinced that I had not even thought about how each employee would be affected. Some solutions are brutal to fix the problem - but honest.
The book clearly identifies crossing the chasm as a war - and that it is indeed. Marketing, especially in the high-tech field, is warfare. This book will give you the strategies and tactics to launch this type of war campaign.
Read it and read it again and then give it to your senior officers to read. One complaint about the book, is that this clearly focuses on companies building software, hardware, electronics, and etc. that will appeal to multiple markets. If you are building software that you can only clearly see one industry adopting, you basically have already segmented your market. You may choose to segment your target market even further, perhaps by location to go with the book (that's what we did). This book does little in talking about that type of innovation, but if you do some thinking and apply the core principles of the book, you should be able to develop a strategy that works really well.
One other point, by no means a flaw, is that it does little explaining what goes on before the chasm period (hints here and there). If you are even unsure has to how to start a new high-tech business, I suggest that you should read this book but look elsewhere for other resources and perhaps find someone with that knowledge that can help.
All in all, this is one amazing book and I highly recommend it to any high-tech entrepreneur.
(From quoting Robert Morris, USA)
Target readers:
Product/Marketing managers, business development managers, entrepreneurs, IT consultants, system integrators, venture capitalists, product development professionals/ engineers, MBAs, and people interested in IT/Internet and other high-tech industries.
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Geoffrey A. Moore is the author of two bestselling books on the development of high-tech markets: Crossing the Chasm and Inside the Tornado. He is chairman of The Chasm Group, which provides marketing strategy consulting services to hundreds of high-tech companies. He is also a venture partner with Mohr Davidow Ventures, a venture capital firm. Moore was recently named one of the "Elite 100 leading the digital revolution" by Upside magazine.
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From Publisher
High-Tech Marketing Expert Identifies the Greatest Challenge Facing New Ventures and Shows How to Address It.
Every year, according to high-tech marketing expert Geoffrey Moore, millions of dollars invested in high-tech entrepreneurial ventures are lost trying to "cross the chasm" from early market success to mainstream market leadership. Moore, President of Geoffrey Moore Consulting, identifies and addresses the key challenges facing such ventures in the long-awaited paperback edition of Crossing the Chasm: How to Win Mainstream Markets for Technology Products.
Targeted at venture capitalists, product managers, and tech marketers, Moore's book identifies a fundamental flaw in the standard high-tech marketing model, which postulates smooth sales growth through a series of well-defined, ever-larger markets. In fact, says Moore, there are really two, fundamentally separate phases in the development of any high-tech market: an early phase that builds from a few, highly visible, visionary customers; and a mainstream phase, where the buying decisions fall predominantly to pragmatists. Transitioning between these two phases is anything but smooth, and confidently assuming that success in the early market will translate into mainstream success is the fatal error that causes so many high-flying start-ups to crash into the chasm.
Crossing the Chasm grows from Moore's extensive consulting experience at Regis McKenna and at his own firm, working with hundreds of technology ventures struggling with these problems. The transition, he notes, is always perilous: typically, the new venture commits significant resources to modifications promised to secure its initial base of early market customers. The venture requires continued growth to support these commitments, growth into the lucrative mainstream markets. But these markets require a very different approach from that of the early visionaries; and if a company does not attack them properly, it will quickly fall short of projections and find itself in trouble. Moore's book presents specific strategies in marketing and all other areas of the business to help technology companies cross this critical chasm successfully.
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High-Tech Marketing
Illusion
As the revised edition of this book is being written, it is 1998, and for this time we have seen a commercial release of the electric car. General Motors makes one, and Ford and Chrysler are sure to follow. Let's assume the cars work like any other, except they are quieter and better for the environment. Now the question is: When are you going to buy one?
The Technology Adoption Life Cycle
Your answer to the preceding question will tell a lot about how you relate to the Technology Adoption Life Cycle., a model for understanding the acceptance of new products. If your answer is, "Not until hell freezes over," you are probably a very late adopter of technology, what we call in the model a laggard. If your answer is, "When I have seen electric cars prove themselves and when there are enough service stations on the road," you might be a middle-of-the-road adopter, or in the model, the early majority. If you say, "Not until most people have made the switch and it becomes really inconvenient to drive a gasoline car," you are probably more of a follower, a member of the late majority. If, on the. other hand, you want to be the first one on your block with an electric car, you are apt to be an innovator or an early adopter.
In a moment we are going to take a look at these labels in greater detail, but first we need to understand their significance. It turns out our attitude toward technology adoption becomes significant - at least in a marketing sense - any time we are introduced to products that require us to change our current mode of behavior or to modify other products and services we rely on. In academic terms, such change-sensitive products are called discontinuous innovations. The contrasting term, continuous innovations, refers to the normal upgrading, of products that does not require us to change behavior.
For example, when Crest promises you whiter teeth, that is a continuous innovation. You still are brushing the same teeth in the same way with the same toothbrush. When Ford's new Taurus promises better mileage, when Dell's latest computer promises faster processing times and more storage space, or when Sony promises sharper and brighter TV pictures, these are all continuous innovations. As a consumer, you don't have to change your ways in order to take advantage of these improvements.
On the other hand, if the Sony were a high-definition TV, it would be incompatible with today's broadcasting standards, which, would require you to seek out special sources of programming. This would be a discontinuous innovation because you would have to change your normal TV-viewing behavior. Similarly if the new Dell computer were to come with the Be operating system, it would be incompatible with today's software base. Again, you would be required to seek out a whole new set of software, thereby classifying this too as a discontinuous innovation. Or if the new Ford car, as we just noted, required electricity instead of gasoline, or if the new toothpaste were a mouthwash that did riot use a toothbrush, then once again you would have a product incompatible with your current infrastructure of supporting components. In all these cases, the innovation demands significant changes by not only the consumer but also the infrastructure. That, is how and why such innovations come to be called discontinuous.
Between continuous and discontinuous there is a spectrum of demands for change. TV dinners, unlike microwave dinners, did not require the purchase of a new oven, but they did require the purchase of more freezer space. Color-TV programming did not, like VCRs, require investing in and mastering a new technology, but they did require buying a new TV and learning more about turning and antennas than many of us wanted to learn. The special washing instructions for certain fabrics, the special street lanes reserved for bicycle riders, the special dialing instructions for calling overseas - all represent some new level of demand on the consumer to absorb a chdn e in behavior. Sooner or later, all businesses must make these demands. And so it is that all businesses can profit, by lessons, from high-tech industries.
Whereas other industries introduce discontinuous innovations only occasionally and with much trepidation, high-tech enterprises do so routinely and as confidently as a born-again Christian holding four aces. From their inception, therefore, high-tech industries needed a marketing model that coped effectively with this type of product introduction. Thus the Technology Adoption Life Cycle became central to the entire sector's approach to marketing. (People are usually amused to learn that the original research that gave rise to this model was done. on the adoption of new strains of seed potatoes among American farmers. Despite these agrarian roots, however, the model has thoroughly transplanted itself into the soil of Silicon Valley.)
The model describes the market penetration of any new technology product in terms. of a progression in the types of consumers it attract throughout its useful life:
As you can see, we have a bell curve. The divisions in the curve are roughly equivalent to where standard deviations would fall. That is, the early majority and the late majority fall within one standard deviation of the mean, the early adopters and the laggards within two, and way out there, at the very onset of a new technology, about three standard deviations from the norm, are the innovators.
The groups are distinguished from each other by their characteristic response to a discontinuous innovation based on a new technology. Each group represents a unique psychographic profile - a combination of psychology and demographics that makes it marketing responses different from those of the other groups. Understanding each profile and its relationship to its neighbors is a critical component of high-tech marketing lore.
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FOREWORD
My journey begins in the dentist's chair. The nurse is pressing dental dough into my lower incisors, and she and the doctor are playing dueling banjos with funny stories about their kids. They've paused for me to nod or grunt as if I, too, were part of their conversation when in walks a man, another dentist, dropping by to say hello. "I've got a good one," he says cheerfully, and goes on to tell a racist joke. I can't recall the joke, only that it ends with a black man who is stupid. Dead silence. It's just us white folks here in the room, but my dentist and his nurse know my wife, who is black, and they know my son and my daughter, who are, as they describe themselves, tan and bright tan.
How many racist jokes have I heard in my life? Five thousand, maybe ten thousand, at least. But today, for the first time - who knows exactly why? - I am struck with a deep, sharp pain. I look at this man, with his pasty face, pale hair, and weak lips, and I think: This idiot's talking about my children!
I want to shake him, shove him against the wall. But I say nothing. Hastily, my dentist grabs a tool, the nurse extracts the dough, and the idiot leaves. But I remain in suspended animation. It isn't just the joke. It isn't the tension in the air. It isn't even the idiot. It's my recognition that I've crossed a line, and that for an instant I've traveled to a place where white Americans rarely go. I feel revulsion and anger at this man. I feel fear and anguish for my children. I feel helpless. Am I, I wonder, feeling like a black man?
I have a memory of a long time ago, when I was eight, maybe nine, when I sat with my grandmother onthe steps of her house in the country, thirty miles outside Chicago, snapping fresh beans. My grandmother was a large, stern woman with a baritone voice, round wire-rimmed glasses, and ashen hair swept up from her forehead, temples, and neck in that old Gibson Girl fashion. I called her Big Grandma with fear and respect. That day she told me she'd been to "the city" - Chicago Heights, which in the 1950s was an industrial town of about thirty-five thousand people. Big Grandma said she'd seen "coloreds" everywhere. She said that while standing in line at the Walgreen's she'd heard one colored lady tell another colored lady, "I always carries a razor in my purse." Big Grandma said this with dramatic inflection, a shiver, and a kind of rage, but I missed her complex meanings. Coloreds, I thought. What in the world are coloreds? I had no idea. But from her tone, I knew enough not to ask. I decided that coloreds were people whose skin, for mysterious reasons, resembled a concoction of melted crayons stirred into a weird, beautiful swirl. When I eventually went to Chicago Heights with Big Grandma and she pointed out a colored, I was amazed. I was disappointed. They weren't colored after all.
Three decades later, sitting in the dentist's chair, I'm struck by how much I am still like that little boy who believed he understood what he absolutely did not. I have been married to a black woman for ten years, and we have two children. I've had years of visiting my wife's family in rural Kentucky, years of births and deaths and holiday meals, of hunting with my father-in-law and his friends, of shared shots of Old Forester, shared jokes, lies, and hunting knives - years of what I believed was a life lived across the color line. Yet only today, at age thirty-nine, have I really felt the intimate intrigues and confusions of race in America.
Only today, for the first time, have I crossed the line.
When does a journey begin? Is it the day or the hour or the minute you finally stash your bags, wave good-bye, and set out?
Or does a journey begin way back before you ever knew you'd set out, when the idea was still locked in some undiscovered place in your mind or your heart, surfacing in only fleeting, misunderstood images and half-noted thoughts for years or even decades? So that when the idea occurs to you - say, in the dentist's chair - it seems you've always had it? That's how it was for me, anyway. From the moment I realized that I needed to do this - go out and travel America's parallel black world - it seemed as if I had always needed to do it. Thank the idiot in the dentist's office. His callousness had pierced my lifetime of distant intellectualizing about race and struck at the place where my hopes for my children reside, struck at my heart and not my head. In that instant, I was touched and humbled, converted. In that instant, I knew in my heart that I didn't know anything about race, that I never had. That I had to start again.
For as long as I can remember, the coloreds, then Negroes, then blacks, and now African Americans, have been somewhere on my mind. I suspect this is true for most white people. In our heads, race is always back there somewhere, on a back burner, bewildering us, making us shake our heads and wonder at "those people," alternately blaming ourselves and them for the conundrum that is race in America. But that's where most of us white folks stop. We've got lives to lead, mortgages to pay, birthdays to celebrate. But for me, from that moment in the dentist's chair, the matters of black and white in America were no longer curiosities. I no longer had the luxury of keeping "those people" on my mind's back burner.
Those people were my kids!
The more I thought about this and listened to my white friends, family, and neighbors, the more I realized how little any of us knew. How few of us had even one close black friend, how few of us had ever had an honest conversation with a black person, how many of us were still hiding behind the same frightened rage I'd seen in Big Grandma on the porch thirty years ago. Looking back, I know now that race has baffled and fascinated me all my life, that I've always yearned to understand "those people," to feel something of what it is they feel. I suspect that this is true for most white people. Because in some way, blacks are our other half. In some way, we can't understand ourselves if we don't understand them. It is racism's oldest dynamic.
So with a lifetime of curiosity to satisfy, and a father's need to protect and guide his children, I am heading out into black America to learn something - not from the statistics and politics of race, but from the lives and voices of real people, black people from every imaginable age, income, occupation, and locale. I've tacked a map of the United States to my wall, and I begin a list of places and people, one filtered through the suggestions of friends and colleagues, black and white, and my own curiosities. I have these goals: When I'm done with my travels, I want to have experienced the breadth of black America. I want to be the blind man who touches the whole elephant. I want the story of my journey to be less like a social scientist's analysis and more like an artist's collage. I want my children, when they are old enough, to be able to pick up this single volume and see, hear, feel, taste, and understand the sweeping arch of people, places, and opinions that make up half of their heritage. Some of my destinations are obvious: Montgomery, Alabama, where Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus in 1955. Some are deeply personal: I hope to find the first black man I ever knew in my life, someone I met when we were both teenagers. In between are dozens of other people I plan to visit: a city police chief, a jazz trumpeter, a convicted murderer, a farmer, an architect, a welfare mother, a corporate mogul, a rap star, moviemakers, Hollywood stars, novelists, poets. All across the country, black people have agreed to show me around, introduce me to their families and friends, tell me the stories of their lives.
That's the plan, anyway. But as I pack clothes, books, notebooks, pens, tapes, and tape recorders, I think of Mark Twain's words, "Circumstances do the planning for us all," and I decide to go where the circumstances take me.
My kids say their quick good-byes and run off to play, not really comprehending that I will be gone more than a little while. My wife walks with me out to my tan Isuzu Trooper with too many miles on it already, kisses me good-bye, and stands with her hands on her cheeks, crying. I think about how much I love her. And I think how strange it is that I'm about to leave this black woman behind so that I might learn more about black America. But this much I take for granted: no one person is black America, not even if she is my wife.
As I wave good-bye and coast down the gentle hill of my driveway, I suddenly think, I'm crazy! Why am I doing this? But I keep going, because I do know why. I'm doing this for myself, my children, and the dentist with his racist jokes. What do I hope to discover? Who knows? As John Steinbeck wrote, "You don't take the trip. The trip takes you."
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Donna Brewington (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-27 00:00>
While this book (as Moore states) is unabashedly geared toward the high tech industry, I believe entrepreneurs in general, and anyone engaged in bringing forward innovative products, services or ideas will probably find some value here. Given that high tech is, as Moore describes, a "microcosm of larger industrial trends," the marketing strategies are relevant to almost any organization that seeks to create or increase demand for what it sells.
This book requires careful, but not arduous, reading. Brilliant analogies, dry humor, accessible examples and very lucid explanations help to drive home the concepts. Outside of high tech, those engaged in B2B marketing will more readily be able to translate the concepts from this book into their environments. Others will need to translate more heavily to apply the wisdom found here. You will probably be challenged to rethink, not only how you expand your company's presence in the marketplace, but how you define your market (or target audience). You may end up with something much different than you would have thought.
One very key concept is that the way you market your product to win early acceptance will be vastly different from how you market that same product (and might I add service?) to cross the chasm to the mainstream market. Mainstream does not necessarily imply "the masses," but rather the long-term users of your product. In fact, the decision-maker you are targeting at one stage is completely different than the person that you are targeting at the next, and the two have a completely different mindset, completely different objectives and a completely different approach to buying into innovation. The difference is so great as to be very astutely called a "chasm." Yet, crossing that perilous chasm is the only way to ensure viability over the long-run. As Moore succinctly states, it's "a do-or-die proposition for high-tech enterprise." This could be said of many other enterprises as well. Moore cites examples of how, often, it is not the superior product that wins out, but the one that most successfully crosses the chasm.
As someone who highly values the entrepreneurial and the innovative, and the types of people who embody these attributes, in reading this book I am reminded that the strategies required for an organization's long-term success may not be those that are naturally derived from an entrepreneurial mindset, as much as I hate to admit it.
Of the many eloquent analogies found in this book, perhaps, my favorite is the one that Moore uses to launch the discussion of how to successfully cross the chasm. Using the analogy of D Day (Chapter 3), he talks about the need to "concentrate an overwhelmingly superior force on a highly focused target" to secure the beachhead and expand from there. Brilliant! This chapter alone makes the book worthwhile.
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Lars Burgstrom (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-27 00:00>
Long established as a classic, the drawing depicting the different classes of customers and their adoption rates are commonly used in the industry. I personally thought I already understood it, just from osmosis. However, reading the book taught me more about the characteristics of those customers, how you gain penetration into their markets, and most importantly how you manage a team and produce a product into those markets.
There are also lessons in there about establishing a beachhead and how to choose your target customer that dovetail nicely into some more modern work around persona identification in software development and the need to identify just one target persona for your application at a time. This is a great marketing book - even if some of the specific company examples are somewhat dated - whose concepts readily translate into not only management but directly into product development and vision.
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Joanna Daneman (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-27 00:00>
"If you build a better mousetrap" is the old saw about inventing new and improved products. But this adage is completely wrong; if you build a better mousetrap, they DON'T come and buy it and you are left wondering why your product failed to make the grade.
Geoffrey Moore writes clearly about the need to cross the chasm that exists between those customers who buy the latest and greatest and those who hang back for a bit, waiting for..what? They are waiting for an incentive to buy your product for other reasons than "it's NEW!" The problem is, there aren't enough of the customers who will buy anything because it's new and exciting - and what's more, the these customers aren't particularly loyal. The sweet spot of customers are those who wait to see if something new and inventive actually gives them back something of worth, a return on investment, a better way to work, doing more with less, you name it. These customers will often switch to a new technology, but only if they have the right incentive to do so.
If you fail to market effectively to this type of customer, you end up with a pile of boutique products that languish in sales and don't ramp up the profits for your firm. To avoid this all-too-common scenario, many companies are now hiring consultants to teach Moore's methods to their marketing and R&D departments. By "Crossing the Chasm" they strive to market products that will sell. If you are in a tech business, and especially if you are an inventor marketing a new idea, reading this book is a very good idea. In fact, I'd say it's required reading. |
Donald Mitchell (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-27 00:00>
Crossing the Chasm deserves more than five stars for putting "a vocabulary to a market development problem that has given untold grief to any number of high-tech enterprises." Crossing the Chasm is the most influential book about high technology in the last 10 years. When I meet with CEOs of the most successful high technology firms, this is the book that they always bring up. What most people do not realize is that Geoffrey Moore did an excellent update of the book in a revised edition in 1999. If you liked the original, you will like the revision even more. It contains many better and more up-top-date examples, and explores several new ways that companies have crossed the chasm that he had not yet observed in 1991 when the original came out (such as 'piggybacking,' the way that Lotus 1-2-3 built from VisiCalc's initial success). If you plan to work or invest in any high technology companies, you owe it to yourself to read and understand this book. The understanding won't be hard, because the material is clear and well articulated. The book's focus is on a well-known psychological trait (referred to as Social Proof in Influence by Robert Cialdini). There is a potential delay in people using new things 'based on a tendency of pragmatic people to adopt new technology when they see other people like them doing the same.' As a result, companies must concentrate on cracking the right initial markets in a segmented way to get lots of references and a bandwagon effect going. One market segment will often influence the next one. Crossing the Chasm is all about how to select and attack the right segments. Many companies fail because innovators and early adopters are very interested in new technology and opportunities to create setrategic breakthroughs based on technology. As a result, these customers are not very demanding how easy it is to use the new technology. To cross the chasm, these companies must primarily appeal to the 'Early Majority' of pragmatists who want the whole solution to work without having to be assembled by them and to enhance their productivity right away. If you wait too long to commercialize the product or service in this way, you will see your sales shrivel after a fast start with the innovators and early adopters. The next group you must appeal to are the Late Majority, who want to wait until you are the new standard and these people are very price sensitive. Many U.S. high technology companies also fail to make the transitions needed to satisfy this large part of the market (usually one-third of demand). The final group is technology adverse, and simply hopes you will go away (the Laggards). The book describes its principles in terms of D-Day. While that metaphor is apt, I wonder how well people under 35 know D-Day. In the next revision, I suggest that Desert Storm or some more recent metaphor be exchanged for this one. The book's key weakness is that it tries to homogenize high technology markets too much. Rather than present this segmentation as immutable, it would have been a good idea to provide ways to test the form of the psychological attitudes that a given company will face. The sections on how to do scenario thinking about potential segments to serve first are the best parts of the book. Be sure you do these steps. That's where most of the book's value will come for you. Otherwise, all you will have added is a terminology for describing how you failed to cross the chasm. I also commend the brief sections on how finance, research, and development, and human resources executives need to change their behavior in order to help the enterprise be more successful in crossing the chasm. After you finish reading and employing the book, I suggest that you also think about what other psychological perceptions will limit interest in and use of your new developments. You have more chasms to cross than simply the psychological orientation towards technology. You also have to deal with the tradition, misconception, disbelief, ugly duckling, bureaucracy, and communications stalls. Keep looking until you have found and dealt with them all! May you move across the chasm so fast, that you don't even notice that it's there!
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