2009-11-18

One Minute Book Review: Crossing the Chasm

Last week, I finished reading Geoffrey Moore's excellent 
Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling high-tech products to mainstream customers.


Moore sets out by describing the technology adoption lifecycle, and the different demographics that compose it:

The Technology Enthusiasts live on the bleeding edge and take pride to being the first try out new things. They generate the first buzz, but lack loyalty.

The Visionaries see great new strategic opportunities in new products, and are willing the invest and participate heavily in the product development to get a game changing advantage over the competition.

The Pragmatists stand for continuity. They want a proven solution helping them make an incremental, predictable improvement to their business.

The Conservatives believe more in tradition than progress. They will finally adopt new technologies when I becomes inconvenient not do so. By that time, the products have become a commodity, that is well tested and sells with low margins.

The Skeptics pride themselves in intentionally being behind the mainstream. They do not participate in the high-tech marketplace, except to block purchases. Their contribution is feedback about the discrepancies between sales claims and delivered products.


But then comes the key observation: the technology adaption lifecycle does not look like a nicely shaped bell-curve, but more like this:
Ans this will be the central theme of the rest of the book: what separates early and mainstream markets, the gap between early adopters and early majority, the Chasm, and how to cross it.

Moore makes a compelling argument around what he calls Beachhead Strategy and the Whole Product Model. He describes what it takes for a company to get a foothold in the mainstream market and expand from there.

A great read. Highly recommended.

 

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About Axel Fontaine

I'm an entrepreneur, public speaker and software development expert based in Munich.

I'm the creator of Sprinters. Sprinters lets you run your GitHub Actions jobs 10x cheaper on your own AWS account with secure, ephemeral, high-performance, low-cost runners within the privacy of your own VPC.

I also created CloudCaptain, previously known as Boxfuse. CloudCaptain is a cloud deployment platform enabling small and medium size companies to focus on development, while it takes care of infrastructure and operations.

Back in 2010, I bootstrapped Flyway, and grew it into the world's most popular database migration tool. Starting late 2017, I expanded the project beyond its open-source roots into a highly profitable business, acquiring many of the world's largest companies and public institutions as customers. After two years of exponential growth, I sold the company to Redgate in 2019.

In the past I also spoke regularly at many large international conferences including JavaOne, Devoxx, Jfokus, JavaZone, JAX and more about a wide range of topics including modular monoliths, immutable infrastructure and continuous delivery. As part of this I received the JavaOne RockStar speaker award. As a recognition for my contributions to overall Java industry, Oracle awarded me the Java Champion title.

You can find me on 𝕏 as @axelfontaine and email me at axel@axelfontaine.com