A Summary of “Crossing the Chasm”
By Jonathan S. Linowes, Parker Hill Technology
Geoffrey A. Moore, Crossing the Chasm, Marketing and Selling High-Tech
Products to Mainstream Customer (revised edition), HarperCollins Publishers,
New York, 1999
The high-tech marketing guru (and principle of The Chasm Group marketing consultants), Geoffrey Moore offers time tested insights into the problems and dangers facing growing software companies, and a blueprint for survival. This classic text (first published in 1991) is widely accepted as “the bible for bringing cutting-edge products to progressively larger markets.”
For the benefit of the reader, while I do not presume to do justice to Moore's book, I attempt to summarize key points here:
!" market is defined as
A
#"a set of actual or potential customers
#"for a given set of products or services
#"who have a common set of needs or wants, and
#"who reference each other when making a buying decision
The final point may be the least intuitive, but Moore says, "the notion that part of what defines a high-tech market is the tendency of its members to reference each other when making buying decisions-- is absolutely key to successful high-tech marketing."
Many business plans are based on a traditional Technology Adoption Life Cycle, a smooth bell curve of high tech customers, progressing from Innovators, Early Adopters,
Early Majority, Late Majority, and finally Laggards. In turn, this model becomes the foundation for a high-tech marketing model which says the way to develop a market is to work the curve from left to right, progressively winning each group of users, using each
"captured" group as a reference for the next.

1

Moore demonstrates that in fact, there are cracks in the curve, between each phase of the cycle, representing a disassociation between any two groups; that is, "the difficulty