Moore - Crossing the chasm: marketing and selling technology project

PART I
Discovering the Chasm

Introduction
If Bill Gates Can Be a Billionaire

PART II
Crossing the Chasm

Obiwan Kenobi, says Sir Alec Guinness in the original Star Wars movieNow theres a name I havent heard for a long, long time.

The same might well be said of a number of the companies that served as examples in the original edition of Crossing the Chasm. Reading through its index brings to mind the medieval lament, Where are the snows of yesteryear? Where indeed are Aldus, Apollo, Ashton-Tate, Ask, Burroughs, Businessland, and the Byte Shop? Where are Wang, Weitek, and Zilog? Oh lost and by the wind-grieved ghosts, come back again!

But we should not despair. In high tech, the good news is that, although we lose our companies with alarming frequency, we keep the people along with the ideas, and so the industry as a whole goes forward vibrantly, even as the names on our paychecks slide into another seamlessly (OK, as seamlessly as our systems interoperate, which as marketing claims is... well thats another matter).

Crossing the Chasm was written in 1990 and published in 1991. Originally forecast to sell 5,000 copies, it has over a seven year period in the market sold more than 175,000. In high-tech marketing, we call this an upside miss. The appeal of the book, I believe, is that it puts a vocabulary to a market development problem that has given untold grief to any number of high-tech enterprises. Seeing the problem externalized in print has a sort of redemptive effect on people who have fallen prey to it in the pastit wasnt all my fault! Moreover, like a good book on golf, its prescriptions give great hope that just by making this or that minor adjustment perfect results are bound to followthis time well make it work! And so any number of people cheerfully have told me that the book has become the Bible in their company. So much for the spiritual health of our generation.

In editing this revised edition, I have tried to touch as little as possible the logic of the original. This is harder than you might think because over the past decade my views have changed (all right, Ive become older), and I have an inveterate tendency to meddle, as any number of my clients and colleagues will testify. The problem is, when you meddle, you get in deeper and deeper until God knows what you have, but it wasnt what you started with. I have plenty enough opportunity to do that with future books, and I have enough respect for this one to try to stand off a bit.

That being said, I did make a few significant exceptions. I eliminated the section on using thematic niches as a legitimate tactic for crossing the chasm. It turns out instead they were a placeholder for the market tactics used during a merging hypergrowth market, a challenge covered in a subsequent book, Inside the Tornado. Also I have substituted a revised scenario process for the original to incorporate improvements that have evolved over the past several years of consulting at The Chasm Group. Elsewhere, I took a slightly new angle on creating the competition and, when it came to the section on distribution, I have done my best to incorporate the emerging influence of the Internet.

But the overwhelming bulk of the changes in this new editionrepresenting about a third of total textsimply swap out the original examples from the 1980s with new ones from the 1990s. Surprisingly, in the majority of cases this swap works very well. But in other cases, theres been a little force-fitting, and I want to beg your indulgence up front. The world has changed. The high-tech community is now crossing the chasm intentionally rather than unintentionally, and there are now competitors who have read the same book and create plans to block chasm-crossing. The basic forces dont change, but the tactics have become more complicated.

Moreover, we are seeing a new effect which was just barely visible in the prior decade, the piggybacking of one companys offer on another to skip the chasm entirely and jump straight into hypergrowth. In the 1980s Lotus piggybacked on VisiCalc to accomplish this feat in the spreadsheet category. In the 1990s Microsoft has done the same thing to Netscape in browsers. The key insight here is that we should always be tracking the evolution of a technology rather than a given companys product lineits the Technology Adoption Life Cycle, after all. Thus it is spreadsheets, not VisiCalc, Lotus, or Excel, that is the adoption category, just as it is browsers, not Navigator or Explorer. In the early days products and categories were synonymous because technologies were on their first cycles. But today we have multiple decades of invention to build on, and a new offer is no longer quite as new or unprecedented as it used to be. The marketplace is therefore able to absorb this not-quite-so-newtechnology in gulps, for a while letting one company come to the fore, but substituting another should the first company stumble.

Finally, let me close by noting technological changes do not live in isolation but rather come under the influence of changes in surrounding technologies as well. In the early 90s it was the sea change to graphical user interfaces and client-server topologies that created the primary context. As we come to the close of the century it is the complete shift of communications infrastructure to the Internet. These major technology shifts create huge sine waves of change that interact with the smaller sine waves of more local technology shifts, occasionally synthesizing harmonically, more frequently playing out some discordant mix that has customers growling and investors howling.

Navigating in such uncharted waters requires beacons that can be seen above the waves, and that is what models in general, and the chasm models in particular, are for. Models are like constellationsthey are not intended to change in themselves, but their value is in giving perspective on a highly changing world. The chasm model represents a pattern in market development that is based on the tendency of pragmatic people to adopt new technology when they see other people like them doing the same. This causes them to hang together as a group, and the groups initial reaction, like teenagers at a junior high dance, is to hesitate and watch. This is the chasm effect. The tendency is very deep-rooted, and so the pattern is very persistent. As a result, marketers can predict its appearance and build strategies to cope with it, and it is the purpose of this book to help in that process.

But fixing your position relative to the North Star does not keep water out of the boat. As the French proverb says, God loves a sailor, but he has to row for himself. And in that act of rowing the work is huge and the risks high, and every reader of this book who is also a practitioner of high-tech market development has my deepest respect.

With that thought in mind, let me turn you over now to Regis McKenna, author of the original Foreword back in 1991, and then to a fledgling author writing his first acknowledgments.