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Download textbook Crossing The Chasm 3Rd Edition Marketing And Selling Disruptive Products To Mainstream Customers Geoffrey A Moore ebook all chapter pdf
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Author’s Note
When the proposal for Crossing the Chasm was under negotia
tion, both the publisher and the author agreed that if the book
sold more than five thousand copies, it would be doing well.
After all, it was a niche book from an unknown author ad
dressed to the somewhat esoteric challenges of marketing high-
tech products.
In fact, by the end of the decade, the book had sold more
than three hundred thousand copies since its first publication in
1991. O f course, publisher and author were delighted. But the
more interesting question might be, Why was the book so suc
cessful? The answer is a textbook example of the effectiveness
of word-of-mouth marketing, the very practice that the book
advocates in its niche approach to gaining mainstream adoption
for disruptive innovations.
First of all, it turned out that the metaphor of the chasm
and the recommendations for how to cross it struck a deep
chord among experienced high-tech managers. Countless read
ers have told me that, although they valued the material in the
book, it really didn’t tell them anything they didn’t know al
ready. Rather it captured what had been for them scattered in
tuitions and rueful learnings and put them into a coherent set
of frameworks that could be used for future decision making.
This, in turn, caused them to pass the book along to col
leagues, as much to spread the vocabulary as anything else. Thus
the book left the marketing department and began to find its
way to the engineering section, where a whole lot of readers
claimed it was the first marketing book they didn’t throw away
after reading the early chapters. Praise from engineers is praise
indeed, and the author was deeply grateful for this response.
This unusual turn of events also caught the eye of the ven
ture capital community, which became a channel for more book
sales. Venture capitalists saw in the new vocabulary a means to
begin a market development dialogue with their engineering-
oriented entrepreneurs. Indeed for whole companies the book
became required reading, just to get everyone on the same page.
Professors at business schools then picked it up for their
courses in entrepreneurial marketing, which was becoming all
the rage in the decade following the book’s first release. Students
liked the book because it was both descriptive and prescriptive
in clear terms, largely because it communicates the core of its
arguments through metaphors, mixed though they often may
be. If you bought into the analogies, you pretty much had the
essence of the book, and reading it was just a confirmation of
what you already knew.
And so things went swimmingly until around 1997 or so,
when students began asking, “W ho is Ashton Tate or Cullinet?
W hat is WordStar or Ingres?” The examples, which are key to
any argument by analogy, had grown long in the tooth. And so
a revised edition was published, keeping the arguments largely
intact but substituting 1990s companies for their 1980s prede
cessors, further affirming the author’s belief that chasms are a
perennial feature of the tech sector’s landscape.
And that has been pretty much the status quo for the last
decade. Sales have continued apace. Counting foreign language
editions, at the time of this revision, they have surpassed six
hundred thousand copies, with the frameworks in the book
continuing to be invoked in the same contexts as before. But
again, somewhere around 2007 students began asking, “W ho
was ChannelPoint? W ho is VerticalNet? Silicon Graphics? Savi?
Aren’t there any case studies of companies we actually know ?”
And so, once again, it has become time to refresh the examples,
a task that I embrace with enthusiasm, if perhaps a bit belatedly.
As before, my approach has been to preserve the fabric of
the original book. To be sure, much water has passed under the
bridge in the past decade, but once you start remodeling the
bridge, you end up having to reconstruct it end to end. Instead,
what I have allowed myself to do is add two appendices. The
first is a short recap of the argument of the book which followed
Crossing the Chasm , namely Inside the Tornado, the goal of which
was to flesh out in full the Technology Adoption Life Cycle end
to end from the early market, the chasm, and the bowling alley,
on to the tornado, Main Street, and post-adoption category ma
turity. This should allow first-time readers to put crossing the
chasm itself into its broader context.
The second appendix addresses arguably the most dramatic
development in high tech of this century, the rise of consumer
IT driven largely by increasingly innovative uses of mobile de
vices, cloud computing, and the World Wide Web. Prior to
this era, IT categories almost always began life as business-
to-business affairs with a subset eventually trickling down to
business-to-consumer markets after the technology had been
proven and cost reduced. But in this century, it has been the
B2C businesses that have led the way, and it is just now that the
B2B players are reaching out to bring these technologies into
the enterprise.
It turns out that Crossing the Chasm is at heart a B2B market
development model. It can be applied to B2C, at times quite
effectively, but at the end of the day, it is not normally the best
model to use. Instead, a model we have been calling the Four
Gears has proved more useful for digital entrepreneurs building
consumer businesses. So that is the topic addressed in the second
appendix.
All in all, it has been quite a journey. Throughout, I have
enjoyed the support of my family, especially my wife, Marie, as
well as that of my many colleagues at the Chasm Group, Chasm
Institute, TCG Advisors, and Mohr Davidow Ventures. Add to
these my editors from HarperBusiness, my agent, Jim Levine,
and my personal assistant and business manager, Pat Granger,
and you can see it really does take a village. That said, perhaps
most impactful of all have been the hundreds of clients who
have brought to our consulting engagements the most interest
ing problems and the most engaging energy. They are the ones
who inspire us all.
Geoffrey Moore
June 2013
CROSSING THE CHASM
A lso by G e o f f r e y A. M o o r e
Escape Velocity
Dealing with Darwin
Inside the Tornado
Living on the Fault Line
The Gorilla Game
CROSSING
THE CHASM
Marketing and Selling Disruptive
Products to Mainstream Customers
T hird E dition
Geoffrey A. Moore
H A R P ER
BUSINESS
An Imprint o/HzrperCoWmsPublishers
www.harpercollins.com
c r o s s i n g t h e c h a s m , t h i r d e d i t i o n . Copyright © 1991, 1999, 2002, 2014
by Geoffrey A. Moore. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of
America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner
whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quota
tions embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address
HarperCollins Publishers, 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022.
HarperCollins books may be purchased for educational, business, or sales
promotional use. For information, please e-mail the Special Markets De
partment at SPsales@harpercollins.com.
Originally published in hardcover in 1991 by HarperBusiness, an imprint
of HarperCollins Publishers.
t h i r d e d i t i o n — 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-229298-8
14 15 16 17 18 o v /rrd 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
To M arie
Contents
Part I:
Part II:
How, indeed? For in fact, feature for feature, the less successful
product is often arguably superior.
Not content to slink off the stage without some revenge,
this sullen and resentful crew casts about among themselves to
find a scapegoat, and whom do they light upon? With unfailing
consistency and unerring accuracy, all fingers point to — the vice
president of marketing. It is marketing’s fault! Salesforce outmar-
keted RightNow, Linkedln outmarketed Plaxo, Akamai out-
marketed Internap, Rackspace outmarketed Terremark. Now
we too have been outmarketed. Firing is too good for this mon
ster. Hang him!
While this sort of thing takes its toll on the marketing pro
fession, there is more at stake in these failures than a bumpy ex
ecutive career path. When a high-tech venture fails, everyone
goes down with the ship— not only the investors but also the
engineers, the manufacturers, the president, and the reception
ist. All those extra hours worked in hopes of cashing in on an
equity option— all gone.
Worse still, because there is no obvious reason why one ven
ture succeeds and the next one fails, the sources of capital to
fund new products and companies become increasingly wary
of investing. Interest rates go up, valuations go down, and the
willingness to entertain venture risk abates. Meanwhile, Wall
Street just emits another deep sigh. It has long been at wit’s
end when it comes to high-tech stocks. Despite the efforts of
some of its best analysts, these stocks are traditionally misval-
ued, often spectacularly so, and therefore exceedingly volatile.
It is not uncommon for a high-tech company to announce even
a modest shortfall in its quarterly projections and incur a 30 per
cent devaluation in stock price on the following day of trading.
As the kids like to say, W hat’s up with that?
If Mark Zuckerberg Can Be a Billionaire 5
Your answer to the preceding question will tell a lot about how
you relate to the Technology Adoption Life Cycle, a model for
12 C rossing the C hasm
9 Archives of Neurology and Electrology, for May, 1875, and Opera Minora, p. 180.
12 Brain, vol. v. p. 458, Jan., 1883; Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, vol. xi. p.
425, July, 1884.
During the last five years I have published a number of articles and
lectures on the subject of hysteria and hystero-epilepsy, some of
which have been freely used in the preparation of this and the
succeeding sections.13 My first paper on hystero-epilepsy, in the
American Journal of the Medical Sciences, was written to strongly
direct the attention of the American profession to the subject as
studied in France. It was in large part a translation from the works of
Charcot, Richer, and Bourneville, with, however, notes of some
observed cases.
13 “Hystero-epilepsy,” American Journal of the Medical Sciences, October, 1881.
“Illustrations of Local Hysteria,” Polyclinic, vol. i., Nos. 3 and 4, September 15,
October 15, 1883.
“A Case of Nymphomania, with Hystero-epilepsy, etc.,” Medical Times, vol. xv. p. 534,
April 18, 1885.
“Hystero-epilepsy in the Male, etc.,” Medical Times, vol. xv. p. 648, May 30, 1885.
“Some Forms of Myelitis, their Diagnosis from each Other and from Hysterical
Paraplegia,” Medical News, vol. xlvii., Nos. 7 and 8, August 15 and 22, 1885.
“Clinical Lecture on Acute Mania and Hysterical Mania,” Medical Times, vol. xvi. p.
153, November 28, 1885.
PATHOLOGY.—Strictly speaking, hysteria cannot be regarded as
having a morbid anatomy. In an often-quoted case of Charcot's,14 an
old hystero-epileptic woman, affected for ten years with hysterical
contracture of all the limbs, sclerosis of the lateral columns was
found after death. On several occasions this woman experienced
temporary remissions of the contracture, but after a last seizure it
became permanent. This is one of the few reported cases showing
organic lesion; and this was doubtless secondary or a complication.
In a typical case of hystero-epilepsy at the Philadelphia Hospital, a
report of which was made by Dr. J. Guiteras,15 the patient, a young
woman, died subsequently while in my wards. Autopsy and
microscopical examination revealed an irregularly diffused sclerosis,
chiefly occupying the parieto-occipital region of both cerebral
hemispheres. Undoubtedly, as suggested by Charcot, in some of the
grave forms of hysteria either the brain or spinal cord is the seat of
temporary modification, which in time may give place to permanent
material changes. Old cases of chronic hysteria in all probability may
develop a secondary degeneration of the cerebro-spinal nerve-
tracts, or even degeneration of the nerve-centres themselves may
possibly sometimes occur. Two cases now and for a long time under
observation further indicate the truth of this position. One, which has
been reported both by H. C. Wood16 and myself,17 is a case of
hysterical rhythmical chorea in a young woman. Although the
hysterical nature of her original trouble cannot be doubted, she now
has contractures of all the extremities, which seem to have an
organic basis. The other patient is a woman who has reached middle
life; she has several times temporarily recovered from what was
diagnosticated as hysterical paraplegia, in one instance the recovery
lasting for months. Now, after more than four years, she has not
recovered from her last relapse. Contractures, chiefly in the form of
flexure, have developed, and she has every appearance of organic
trouble, probably sclerosis or secondary degeneration of the lateral
columns.
14 Leçons sur les Maladies du Système nerveux.
After a time, the idea that the uterus was the exclusive seat of
hysteria was in large measure supplanted by the view that the sexual
organs in general were concerned in the production of hysterical
phenomena. Romberg defined hysteria as a “reflex neurosis caused
by genital irritation.” Woodbury20 concludes as late as 1876 that only
where the pathological source of hysterical symptoms resides in the
uterus or ovaries, cases may, with some show of propriety, be
termed hysterical; and where the uterus and organs associated with
it in function are not in a morbid condition no symptoms can be
correctly called hysterical.
20 Medical and Surgical Reporter, December 2, 1876.
The truth would seem simply to be, that, as the uterus and ovaries
are the most important female organs, they are therefore a frequent
source of reflex irritation in hysterical patients.
Two hypotheses, the vaso-motor and the dynamic, chiefly hold sway.
The vaso-motor, attractive because of its apparent simplicity, has
been well set forth by Walton,24 who contends that while it may not
be competent to easily explain all hysterical symptoms, it will best
explain some of the major manifestations of hysteria—for example,
hemianæsthesia. Hemianæsthesia, he argues, may appear and
disappear suddenly; it may be transferred from one side of the body
to another in a few seconds; so blood-vessels can dilate as in a
blush, or contract as in the pallor of fear, in an instant. In fainting the
higher cerebral functions are suspended, presumably because of
vaso-motor changes; therefore the sudden loss of function of one-
half of the brain-centres, seen sometimes in hysterical hemiplegia
and hemianæsthesia, may easily be imagined to be the result of an
instantaneous and more or less complete contraction of cortical
blood-vessels on that side. Neurotic patients have a peculiarly
irritable vaso-motor nervous system. He records a case seen in
consultation with H. W. Bradford. The patient had a right-sided
hemianæsthesia, including the special senses, the sight in the left
eye being almost wanting. The fundus of the right eye was normal;
the left showed an extreme contractility of the retinal blood-vessels
under ophthalmoscopic examination; these contracted to one-third
their calibre, and the patient was unable to have the examination
continued. The explanation offered is, that spasm of the blood-
vessels on the surface of the left cerebral hemisphere had caused,
by modification of the cortical cells, a right-sided hemianæsthesia,
including the sight, and by reaching the meninges a left-sided spastic
migraine, and by extending to the fundus of the left eye an
intermittent retinal ischæmia.
24 Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, vol. xi., July, 1884, p. 424 et seq.
Lloyd28 contends that most hysterical symptoms, if not all, are due to
abnormal states of consciousness. The development of this idea
constitutes his argument for the recognition of the disease as a true
psychosis. In the reflex action, not only of the lower spinal cord and
ganglia of special sensation, but of the highest centres of the brain,
he sees the explanation of many of the characteristics of hysteria. In
other words, he finds that the sphere of the disease is more
especially in the automatic action of the brain and cord.
28 Op. cit.
(4) The psychical element enters in that, either, on the one hand,
violent mental stimuli which originate in the cerebral hemispheres
are transmitted to vaso-motor conductors,30 or, on the other hand,
psychical passivity or torpor permits the undue activity of the lower
nervous levels.
30 Rosenthal.
Briquet has also made some careful investigations into the subject of
the health of infants born of hysterical mothers. The investigations
were based upon a study of 240 hysterical women, with whom he
compared 240 other patients affected with such diseases as fever,
phthisis, cancer, diseases of the heart, liver, and kidneys, but without
any hysterical symptoms. In brief, the result of his investigations was
that children born of hysterical mothers die more frequently and at a
younger age than those who are born of mothers not hysterical.
The relation of hysteria to certain morbid constitutional states has
long been recognized, particularly its connection with the tubercular
diathesis. This has been shown by numerous observers, especially
among the French. The most valuable recent contribution is that of
Grasset,33 who believes that a direct connection can be traced
between the tubercular diathesis and hysteria. When the relations of
hysteria to the scrofulous and tubercular diathesis are spoken of by
him, it is not meant that hysterical subjects have tubercles in the
lungs, but that these diatheses are found in various generations, and
that among some subjects of the hereditary series the constitutional
states manifest themselves as hysteria. It is not the evidences of
hysteria with pulmonary and other tuberculous conditions that he is
considering, but that hysteria may be, and often is, a manifestation of
the tubercular diathesis. Two cases may present themselves: in one
the neurosis is the only manifestation of the diathesis; in the other, it
is continued in the same subject along with the other diathetic
manifestations. In demonstration of his thesis he concludes with a
series of most interesting cases, which he arranges into two groups.
In the first, hysteria is the only manifestation of the tubercular
diathesis; in the second, are simultaneous pulmonary and hysterical
manifestations. In the first group he has arrayed eight personal
observations and seventeen derived from various authors; in the
second he has two personal and seventeen compiled observations.
33 “The Relation of Hysteria with the Scrofulous and the Tubercular Diathesis,” by J.
Grasset, Brain, Jan., April, and July, 1884.
Hysteria may occur in any rank of life. It is not, as has been held by
some, a disease of the luxurious classes. The American physician
who has seen much of this disorder—and that means every
physician of large practice—has met with hysterical cases in every
walk of life. While this is true, however, hysteria of certain types is
met with more frequently in certain social positions. Some of the
remarks about race and climate apply also here. It is the type of the
disorder, and its relative frequency among various classes, which are
affected by social position. Young women of the richer classes, who
have been coddled and pampered, whose wants and whose whims
have been served without stint or opposition, often pass into
hysterical conditions which do not have any special determining
causative factor, or at least only such as are comparatively trivial.
Occasionally, in them hystero-epilepsy, catalepsy, and the train of
grave hysterical phenomena are observed. We are more likely,
however, to have the minor and indefinite hysterical symptoms; or, if
grave manifestations be present, they are most usually ataxia,
paralysis, contractures, or aphonia, and not convulsive phenomena.
Hysteria in our American cities is especially prevalent among certain
classes of working-people, as among the operatives in
manufacturing establishments. Dividing American society into the
three classes of rich, middle, and poor, hysteria is most prevalent in
the first and the last. It is, however, by no means absent in the
middle class.
The absence of occupation on the one hand, and, on the other, the
necessity of following work for which the individual is unfitted,
particularly irritating lines of work, predispose to the occurrence of
hysteria. It may be caused, therefore, either by no work, overwork, or
irritating work. As to the special occupations, hysteria would seem to
result most commonly in those positions where physical fatigue
combines with undue mental irritation to harass and reduce the
nervous system. In men it occurs often as the result of overwork
conjoined with financial embarrassment. It is met with not
infrequently among teachers, particularly those who are engaged in
the straining and overstraining labor of preparing children for
examinations. A good method of education is the best preventive; a
bad method is one of the most fruitful causes of the affection. The
injurious effect of American school or college life in the production of
hysteria is undoubted, and should be thoroughly appreciated. Our
educational processes act both as predisposing and exciting causes
of this disorder. Both in our private and public educational institutions
the conditions are frequently such as to lead to the production of
hysteria or to confirm and intensify the hysterical temperament. In
our large cities all physicians in considerable practice are called
upon to treat hysterical girls and boys, the former more frequently,
but the latter oftener than is commonly supposed. Hysteria in boys,
indeed, does not always meet with recognition, from the fact that it is
in boys. Cases of hysteria in girls under twelve years of age have
come under my observation somewhat frequently. About or just
succeeding examination-time these cases are largely multiplied. The
hysteria under such circumstances may assume almost any phase;
usually, however, we have not to deal in such patients with
convulsive types of the disease.