Quotes from Geoffrey A. Moore

The single most important difference between early markets and mainstream markets is that the former are willing to take responsibility for piecing together the whole product (in return for getting a jump on their competition), whereas the latter are not.

Why is it so important to attack your competitors during a tornado instead of serve your customers? Why, specifically, was Larry Ellison once quoted as saying, citing Genghis Khan, "It is not enough that we win—all others must lose"?

Compelling reason to buy • Whole product • Partners and allies • Distribution • Pricing • Competition • Positioning • Next target customer

The number-one corporate objective, when crossing the chasm, is to secure a distribution channel into the mainstream market, one with which the pragmatist customer will be comfortable.

when crossing the chasm, we are looking to attract customer-oriented distribution with one of our primary lures being distribution-oriented pricing. Customer-Oriented

As soon as the numbers get up in a chart - or better yet, a graph - as soon as they thus become blessed with some specious authenticity, they become the drivers in high-risk, low-data situations because these people are so anxious to have data. That's when you hear them saying things like "It will be a billion-dollar market in 2016. If we only get five percent of that market..." When you hear that sort of stuff, exit gracefully, holding on to your wallet.

but you had better realize you are adding apples and oranges (that is, doctor sales + engineer sales) to get your final totals, and in so doing, you are leaving yourself open to misinterpreting the data badly. Most important, market, when it is defined in this sense, ceases to be a single, isolable object of action—it no longer refers to any single entity that can be acted on—and cannot, therefore, be the focus of marketing.

It turns out, to disrupt someone else's business, you have to add a net new line of business to your own portfolio. This

Adding a new line of business to an existing portfolio creates a crisis of prioritization. Such

What the company staff interpreted as a ramp in sales leading smoothly "up the curve" was in fact an initial blip—what we will be calling the early market—and not the first indications of an emerging mainstream market.

They will work with vendors who have little or no funding, with products that start life as little more than a diagram on a whiteboard, and with technology gurus who bear a disconcerting resemblance to Rasputin.

It turns out our attitude toward technology adoption becomes significant—at least in a marketing sense—any time we are introduced to products that require us to change our current mode of behavior or to modify other products and services we rely on. In academic terms, such change-sensitive products are called discontinuous innovations. The contrasting term, continuous innovations, refers to the normal upgrading of products that does not require us to change behavior.

First there is a mountain, Then there is no mountain, Then there is. —Zen proverb

Dinks (Double Income, No Kids), or Henrys (High Earners, Not Rich Yet).

Technologies from a prior era, once the focal point of innovation, now become the scaffolding upon which next-generation innovation will build.

Ultimately the service that skeptics provide to high-tech marketers is to point continually to the discrepancies between the sales claims and the delivered product. These discrepancies, in turn, create opportunities for the customer to fail, and such failures, through word of mouth, will ultimately come back to haunt us as lost market share.

Why me?' cries out the unsuccessful entrepreneur. Or rather 'Why not me?' 'Why not us?' chorus his equally unsuccessful investors. 'Look at our product. Is it not as good--nay, better--than the product that beat us out?'.... In fact, feature for feature, the less successful product is often arguably superior.

Most companies fail to cross the chasm because, confronted with the immensity of opportunity represented by a mainstream market, they lose their focus, chasing every opportunity that presents itself, but finding themselves unable to deliver a salable proposition to any true pragmatist buyer.

existing ones. At the same time, it needs to separate its revenue performance activities from its enabling investments, focusing the former on delivering results based on what the latter have helped to seed and till. As the following diagram indicates, these two divisions result in four zones of management activity, each aligned with one, and only one, investment horizon, each demanding a different style of leadership to achieve those ends.

The competition takes place at the level of corporate agenda, not at the level of competing products. That

We do not have, nor are we willing to adopt, any discipline that would ever require us to stop pursuing any sale at any time for any reason. We are, in other words, not a market- driven company; we are a sales-driven company.

Visionaries are that rare breed of people who have the insight to match up an emerging technology to a strategic opportunity, the temperament to translate that insight into a high-visibility, high-risk project, and the charisma to get the rest of their organization to buy into that project. They are the early adopters of high-tech products.

The word risk is a negative one in their vocabulary—it does not connote opportunity or excitement but rather the chance to waste money and time.

Pioneers are people with arrows in their backs")