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Crossing the Chasm
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List Price:
$17.95
Global Home Business Price:
$12.21
Your Savings: $ 5.74 ( 32% )
Subject To Change Without Notice
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Collins Business
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 658.8
EAN: 9780060517120
ISBN: 0060517123
Label: Collins Business
Manufacturer: Collins Business
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 256
Publication Date: 2002-08
Publisher: Collins Business
Release Date: 2002-08-20
Studio: Collins Business
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Editorial Reviews:
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Here is the bestselling guide that created a new game plan for marketing in high-tech industries. Crossing the Chasm has become the bible for bringing cutting-edge products to progressively larger markets. This edition provides new insights into the realities of high-tech marketing, with special emphasis on the Internet. It's essential reading for anyone with a stake in the world's most exciting marketplace.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Must read for anyone in high tech marketing
Comment: For a book on high tech that was first published nearly two decades ago to feel so relevant today is a testament to the ideas and writing of Geoffrey Moore. Its frankly pretty amazing how Moore seems like he's discussing the various success and failures of the social networks and their adoption issues (friendster, myspace, and facebook).
The genius of this book is not the discussion of how technology adoption follows a normal distribution. The genius is in Moore's research around how to increase your chances for taking a technology or idea from its early nascent days to mainstream success. The key as Moore lays it out is in the attitudinal differences between members of the Early Adopters and the Early Majority. The early adopters he argues are typically Technologists and Visionaries, and can see the possibilities of what a technology represents. They are more willing to play with immature technologies (in the case of Technologists, it's a geek thing we wouldn't understand, in the case of visionaries, it's about pushing what's possible further along). In order to continue to grow the business beyond this early set of customer you have to prove your value to the pragmatists that make up the Early Majority who want to go with a proven leader. This is the chasm, to shift from the Early Adopters to the Early Majority if you will. This is where a great number of companies falter and don't last.
The key per Moore, and frankly it jives really well with my admittedly anecdotal experience, is to focus on a small segment, while keeping your end goal in mind. To do this, you have to pick the right segment to focus your efforts on in order to build out the product. Moore argues that in order to know whether your segment is the right size or is truly a segment, you have to a small enough community that can generate word of mouth completely on its own. To me this is sound advice no matter the truth of whether technology adoption occurs this way or not, as it forces companies to focus on a relatively small group of customers with common concerns, which in and of itself is a great thing. It means that the service/product is going to get developed completely for a group of people instead of trying to be all things to all people.
Moore has a great analogy, to describe this strategy. He calls it D-Day. Your end goal is the liberation of Europe. In order to do this, you need first to get a foothold in Europe. To do this you must gather all of your resources and position them to come out of the early adopter market (England) and send them onto a focused point (Normandy) in a rapid manner in order to cross the chasm (English Channel), and ultimately to success (mass market appeal).
There are tons of other great insights in this book (from understanding the need for a larger ecosystem of companies to define a value chain, to positioning yourself relative to your competition).
Complete review of this and other interesting non-fiction can be found at www.cosmicwanderlust.com
Customer Rating:
Summary: Worth reading
Comment: Nutshell review - An interesting concept and well written book describing how companies need to make the jump from the early adopters of their products to main-stream users in order to truly reap the rewards and succeed. However, as is often the case with these types of books, it could have been written in fewer pages. Worth reading nonetheless.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Surprisingly Real
Comment: It is amazing how this book describes, through real examples, they key role that the marketing plays in the massive adoption of a technology. Although most of the ideas should be known by most of the technological marketing people, this book must be a reference for newcomers.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Crossing the Chasm
Comment: I've bought copies of Crossing the Chasm for two customers and one associate. I guess that means I'm impressed.
Few books, IMHO, can have a profound "life altering" effect on a business. E-Myth Revisited was one. This is another. It provides a very well thought out and persuasive strategy for transitioning a high-tech product from a geek market into the mainstream.
A must read if you have a highly advanced product and are struggling to get traction in the market place.
Customer Rating:
Summary: How companies "grow up"
Comment: Having already read the sequel, Inside the Tornado, I wondered whether this book had essentially been summarized in that one. While the basic premise of the technology adoption lifecycle is common to both books, this book, as the name implies, gives much more focus and detail to the stage of "crossing the chasm". This translates to the time between the first few big sales (from innovators) and the point where there are steady (and growing) sales (from pragmatists). This is a particularly troubling time for most companies because what worked on those first few will FAIL on the next customers, because they are more risk-averse. This book does a fantastic job of not only explaining what needs to be done, but WHY as well.
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