Crossing the Chasm
Crossing the Chasm (geoffrey-moore, 1991; revised 1999, 2014) is the most influential refinement of the technology-adoption-curve. Its core claim: there is a chasm — a sharp discontinuity — between the early adopters (visionaries) and the early majority (pragmatists), because the two have “very different expectations.” Visionaries accept risk for advantage; pragmatists adopt only once a technology is proven, has competition, and solves their specific problem. Many products die in this gap.
The strategy
- Beachhead / bowling-pin market. Don’t chase the broad market at once; dominate one narrow, well-defined segment of the early majority to build reputation and a “bandwagon effect,” then expand to adjacent segments.
- The whole product. Pragmatists need a complete solution to their problem, not just the core innovation — the surrounding ecosystem/support is part of what they buy.
Relationship to Rogers (a real tension)
Moore adapted Rogers’ diffusion model but added the chasm. Rogers pushed back, holding that innovativeness is “a continuous variable” with no sharp discontinuities — so the chasm is a marketing heuristic, not a property of Rogers’ curve. This continuous-vs-discontinuous disagreement is a flagged tension in synthesis; it also rhymes with tech-adoption-curve-twenty-years‘s observation that branded technologies (SOA) can stall while their substance lives on.
Related
technology-adoption-curve · geoffrey-moore · diffusion-of-innovations-wikipedia · everett-rogers · gartner-hype-cycle