Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers

by Geoffrey A. Moore

The same logic holds for why pragmatists prefer ARM’s smartphone microprocessors to Intel’s Atom, Google Search to Microsoft’s Bing, Apple’s iPhone to RIM’s BlackBerry, HP printers to Epson’s, Cisco routers to Huawei’s. In every case, there is a risk that they are preferring an inferior product—if you look only at the generic product. But in every case, they are preferring the superior product if you look at the whole product. To net this out: Pragmatists evaluate and buy whole products. The generic product, the product you ship, is a key part of the whole product, make no mistake. But once there are more than one or two comparable products in the marketplace, then investing in additional R&D at the generic level has a decreasing return, whereas there is an increasing return from marketing investments at the levels of the expected, the augmented, or the potential product.