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

by Geoffrey A. Moore

no single pond of a size we can dominate in the short term is large enough to provide a sustaining market for the long term. Sooner or later, we have to expand into adjacent ponds. Or, to shift the metaphor, we need to reframe our tactics in the context of a “bowling pin” strategy, where one targets a given segment not just because one can “knock it over” but because, in so doing, it will help knock over the next target segment, and thus lead to market expansion.

• A second problem: The company sells the visionary before it has the product. This is a version of the famous vaporware problem, based on preannouncing and premarketing a