Visionaries Poison the Well for Pragmatists

"Because of these incompatibilities, early adopters do not make good references for the early majority. And because of the early majority’s concern not to disrupt their organizations, good references are critical to their buying decisions. So what we have here is a catch-22. The only suitable reference for an early majority customer, it turns out, is another member of the early majority, but no upstanding member of the early majority will buy without first having consulted with several suitable references."

"Crossing the chasm requires moving from an environment of support among the visionaries back into one of skepticism among the pragmatists."

"that markets—particularly high-tech markets—are made up of people who reference each other during the buying decision. As we move from segment to segment in the technology adoption life cycle, we may have any number of references built up, but they may not be of the right sort."

"To be specific, the point of greatest peril in the development of a high-tech market lies in making the transition from an early market dominated by a few visionary customers to a mainstream market dominated by a large block of customers who are predominantly pragmatists in orientation. The gap between these two markets, all too frequently ignored, is in fact so significant as to warrant being called a chasm, and crossing this chasm must be the primary focus of any long-term high-tech marketing plan. A successful crossing is how high-tech fortunes are made; failure in the attempt is how they are lost."