What Is the Chasm Described by Geoffrey Moore? What Does Crossing It Mean?

Geoffrey Moore (1999) stated that, regarding a smooth bell curve of the traditional Technology Adoption Life Cycle, there are five groups of high tech customers which are innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards. The way to get these customers is to work the curve from left to right. Since the early majority (pragmatists) and late majority (conservatives) are the two big groups in the middle, to be successful, the high tech companies have to sell the product to them.

Because the conservatives will buy the product when they see the pragmatists buy and happy with it, it’s not difficult to sell the conservatives. But the pragmatists are also the followers; they’ll buy when they see someone else buys. Thus, the problem is how to sell the product to the pragmatists. As the early adopters are risk takers who like to try new things, they drive the high-tech industry because they see the potential to be a leader in the way that no one has gone before. For that reason, it’s now possible to sell the high-tech product to the pragmatists with the help of the early adopters.

However, Moore