Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey A. Moore

Yes, it's a boring business book review today.

Crossing the Chasm was recommended to me by my teacher, when he found out that my team wanted to do something on social media and why people choose certain platforms over others. While Crossing the Chasm is written for the business looking to bring their product to the mainstream market, I thought it was pretty useful in helping me understand why some products take off while others don't.

The essence of this book is on how to sell to "pragmatists", or the "Early Majority" in the Technology Adoption Life Cycle. I remember an article on how in some cases, laggards can turn into innovators (the case was something on smartphones and kindles or something like that), so I'm not sure how strong the theory is per se, but if you believe the theory holds true, then you're going to be very interested in what the book says.

The strategy in this book is to basically get the company to understand that innovators/early adopters and the early majority are two distinct and separate groups. And because they evaluate and choose products differently, you have to change your strategy when crossing the chasm. This includes targeting niches, positioning yourself and pricing.

There were quite a few examples in this book, but to be honest, I didn't recognise a lot of them (oops?). I guess it really does go to show that the product life cycle is getting shorter and shorter. Either that or I really need to be more observant. But while the examples may be dated, the principles didn't feel so (but I'm not in this industry, so take this with a huge huge grain of salt).