Crossing the Chasm, Making the Leap

Moore's primary point in this book is that the early adopters of a technology are not necessarily the same as the mainstream market. Moore points out that early adapters often buy things because they're cool, not for practical reasons. Early adapters deal with pain in the form of bad interfaces, minimal network effects. etc. Following this informal observation, Moore divides the population into innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards. This is his "Technology Adoption Life Cycle", of which the "underlying thesis is that technology is absorbed into any given community in stages corresponding to the psychological and social profiles of various segments within that market" (p. 15). He illustrates this with a bell curve with a horizontal axis corresponding to time of adoption. There's no explanation for why a Bell curve; I'm guessing it just looks pretty in PowerPoint. Moore continues with "this process can be thought of as a continuum with definite stages, each associated with a definable group" (p. 15), although actual definitions are notable by their absence. So Moore advises us that marketing to the two groups might have to be different. Complex? No. Obvious? Perhaps. In any case, this observation is followed with 185 pages of examples and pep talks which I found perfectly readable, but without much additional content.

The second point, which is really just as important, is that the way to "cross the chasm" is by targeting a single industry or group of users, a so-called "vertical market". The only way customers who are beyond the early adopter phase are going to buy into a new product is if it is easy to adopt or if it truly fills a perceived desperate need. That is, it looks less "disruptive". Usually this means a lot of custom integration with industry-specific infrastructure. It's easier to build something well integrated with existing, for say, just the airline industry and their SABRE database backend, than it is to try to target the entire Fortune 500, each sector of which has adopted different sorts of databases. It worked just the way Moore described for my company, where Moore's book was required reading.

So, what about cities? They rise and fall based on circumstance and leadership, but tend to have more staying power than companies. Cities may go bankrupt if things go really bad, but rarely do they go away altogether. How many ghost towns do you really encounter on the road of life? Cities tend to just slide into mediocrity, rather than go away altogether. What is it about cities that really "get it" and thrive, becoming vibrant places where people want to live and make a future for themselves?

I'd argue that cities that face the truth about themselves are healthy cities. They're aware of their strengths and weaknesses, and like a good sports team, they play to those strengths and address their weaknesses. They develop a plan to make the most of what they have.

When it comes to broadband, cities face a challenge similar to the hiker at the start of this post, similar to tech companies in a growth stage, a la Geoffrey Moore - they have now encountered an obstacle in their path and need to determine what it is they will do with themselves - Forge Ahead, Turn Around, or Stop?

To forge ahead, they'll need to make a leap to transform themselves from the old way of doing things to the new way. They'll have to reinvent themselves to adapt to the times. And in today's world, that adaptation has to do with broadband infrastructure. Call it Making the Leap.