Crossing the Chasm

Rating:
Summary: Appalling grammar
Review: An excellent book for anyone in the IT marketing field. Written in a style that anyone can understand. Unfortunately, the grammar is appalling. Mr. Moore needs a new sub-editor.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Content, Horrible Proofreading
Review: This is an excellent book in terms of content. I work in the high tech industry on a product in the process of "crossing the chasm". Although I work on the technology side, I found this book to be a great crash course in marketing directly applicable to the situation we currently face. The concepts were so clearly presented that I passed the information on to a high school teacher who does a marketing lesson as his final unit of the school year.

However, it is clear that the sole proofreading consisted of using spellcheck. For example, on page 182 of the text, one sentence reads "All that being said, what can the Internet due for a fledgling enterprise seeking to crossing the chasm". This is embarassing considering the book was written by a former English professor.

Rating:
Summary: Quick, but effective!
Review: For anyone who is involved in technology marketing, this is a must read. It will only take a few hours, but the concepts are critical to success in today's environment. This is the one 20th century book that will have a lasting effect on the 21st century.

Rating:
Summary: This works, I wish I would have read this 2 years ago....
Review: This book is an excellent and highly relevant primer on the pitfalls that befall high-tech start-ups, and how to avoid them. The last company I wwas with hit every one of the potholes that Moore highlights. If the management had read this book, it would have saved the company years in the business cycle, and they would probably be public right now.

Rating:
Summary: Summary & Comments
Review: Crossing the Chasm explains how to successfully take a high-tech idea from a few customers to a lot of customers. A great chasm exists between selling to a handful of visionaries and to a mass market. This is because the two camps are fundamentally different in that they buy for different reasons.

A useful analogy is the Wild West that was first explored by the pioneers and then developed into a society by the settlers. A new market initially consists of entirely pioneers: pioneers create great technology that they sell to other pioneers who seek to achieve extraordinary results. When it comes time to sell to the settlers, no sales happen, because settlers and pioneers don't speak the same language. The settlers are not impressed by the achievements of the pioneers that first benefited from the technology, because they are more concerned about how the product will be accepted by the other settlers. A catch-22 ensues, because no settler wants to buy since other settlers haven't.

Crossing the Chasm is about cracking this catch-22. It suggests focusing exclusively on small enough a segment of the market that no other competitor cares to. The critical decision is which submarket to go after. The right submarket is one where there is a lot of communication among the members, because you want them to help sell your product through word-of-mouth. Once the target market is won, there should be clear word-of-mouth paths to other submarkets that can be conquered in a similar way. However you should not have to focus an entire company behind the subsequent submarkets. Instead, winning the first submarket should be like bowling down the head pin; the rest should fall by chain reaction.

The product sold to the pioneer is different than the product sold to the settler. The pioneer buys the raw technology, but the settler buys the whole product. The whole product is the raw technology, plus everything else necessary to satisfy the submarket's particular business problem. This includes training and the like, but also complimentary products and services from other vendors. If such a collection of additions is available, it's evidence that enough other settlers are using the product that it will be around for a long time. That is really what settlers want to buy, and not necessarily the best technology.

So creating the market around the technology is key for crossing the chasm. Quite surprisingly this means creating the competition. This really is an act of market positioning. Settlers will understand you best if you can explain what you do in terms they already know. For one you want to distinguish a market alternative, an alternative way of doing something, and it is usually the old way of doing something. Second, you want to distinguish a product alternative, identifying some product that is out there that could do what the settler needs, but it has not adopted a focus on the particular problem of the submarket. By telling the settler what is the market alternative, you can make the sale happen sooner, because they can see what categories are in their budget and then decide to buy your product with that money rather than spending money to do things the old way.

Crossing the chasm is more than just going from pioneer customers to settler customers. It is also about going from pioneer employees to settler employees. Pioneer employees don't get the same satisfaction from satisfying settler customers as they do with satisfying pioneer customers. Pioneers like fundamental breakthroughs, while settlers like building their careers and climbing corporate ladders.

I learned a lot from this book, but I am disappointed that a few holes were not addressed:

1-What happens when two hi-tech companies both cross the chasm, but with different submarkets with equally strong possibilities for helping to conquer subsequent submarkets?

2-How am I supposed to take this book seriously when the success stories it sites are not companies who are winning in their industry (SGI, Documentum, Lawsen)?

3-If visionary customers are not good references for the mainstream, why not go after the mainstream from day one?

Rating:
Summary: Hire a Proofreader
Review: Very good content but the worst grammar I've ever seen in a book, much less a best-selling business book. Obviously relied on a spell-checker and then rushed into print. No excuse for such a poor job on a revised edition. I could not in good conscience recommend this edition to anyone.

Rating:
Summary: Interesting content, but terrible editing
Review: This book contains many interesting high-tech marketing principles and real-world examples. Further, it is readily understandable by a non-business person such as myself. However, it is the most poorly edited book that I have ever read. I found myself mentally correcting for at least one error per page, which became very distracting.

Rating:
Summary: Spell Check Doesn't Cut It
Review: Crossing the Chasm is a great book. However, it is painfully obvious that HarperCollins didn't hire any proofreaders for the final copy. It's like they ran it through Microsoft Word and looked for red squigglies... A bad case of "if its [sic] spelled correctly, it mast [sic] be write [sic]" Right?

Rating:
Summary: Good points in a non-academic wrapping
Review: As a managing director of an organisation which is in the niche of niches and being a spin off from a research institute I recognise my own challenges in this book.

Mr Moore has produced a book that makes a number of intuitive but good points with regards to the marketing of high tech products and market assault strategies. It then proceeds to break these down into chunks that are well described and almost recipe type recommendations.

This is the strength of the book. It is intuitive, makes sense and contains easy to implement recommendations. I found the book very interesting and relevant.

However, it is not a book that holds up to higher academic standards with regards to documentation of the cases discussed and volume of case studies. However, I am sure that by the time academia catches up we will already be into the next phase of market approach strategies.

I see the pitiful comments with regards to spelling, well as a Norwegian I could not care less.

All together a joyful and very readable experience.

Rating:
Summary: Responding to concerns about typos
Review: Several reviewers have expressed concerns about typos. If these readers or anyone else kind enough to do so would send me a list of the typos noted, it will help me and my publisher correct them for the next printing (please use the email address below). I will search for myself as well, of course, but apparently I have already proven inept in this task. Thanks.