Crossing the Chasm -A further Critique

On the whole, the reader found the book extremely enjoyable. Moore's conversational style combined with some very funny analogies keeps the entertainment factor high. Being an engineer, this reader found the content educational to say the least, all the concepts were new however, after consulting with a few marketing people, a discovery was made that, not much of what Moore is saying is, in fact, new. More critically, some colleagues in the know claim crossing the chasm to be far from a particularly good text as far as Marketing is concerned. Market segmentation as well as adjusting for psychographics is nothing new, possibly two of the fundamental principles of marketing. In a deductive sense, the obvious question may apply, 'why is the high tech community seemingly poor at addressing these issues?'

Possibly, Moore answers this question himself by stating that some of the principles are, in themselves, counter intuitive. Disruptive technology presents an immense challenge to the high tech community, this book can perhaps serve as a basic guide to how things need to progress in order to capture the elusive but lucrative mainstream market.

Aside from the debate over crossing the chasm's scholarly value, Moore does manage to keep the emphasis on the difficulties of penetrating the mainstream market without becoming stale. This is achieved with militant analogies and relevant organisational cases. On completion of the book, the reader is left in no doubt about the perils of marketing disruptive innovation.

What the book does not explain is how disruptive innovation is nurtured and/or assessed for viability in the current market, separating the wheat from the chaff so to speak. Having said this, the intention of the book is to establish a mainstream market from a given innovation and not the process of innovating.

From this text it seems that there is only one viable approach to winning over the market place as far as the high tech community is concerned, instinctively this casts doubt and to quote a wise old saying "there are many ways to skin a cat". Here are two more recent texts which identify strategies for the same purpose: Click to go to abstracts:

None the less, this reader has gained many valuable insights to the world of high tech marketing. More importantly, Moore presents the concepts in a memorable format, allowing for clear understanding and the best chance of retaining the main ideas of crossing the chasm.

Favourite Quote "It's like eating sausage, it tastes good until you know how it's made".