Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers

by Geoffrey A. Moore

The PalmPilot team, headed by Jeff Hawkins on the technical side and Donna Dublinsky on the business side, had the advantage of seeing a lot of things not work. But to their credit they had the gumption to pick a focus and stick to it. The result was a truly compelling consumer product. The form factor fit in a breast pocket (obsoleting the pocket protector whose space and role it preempted). The application interface was intuitive to anyone who had ever used a Mac or Windows PC (the entirety of the target market), it had a hugely convenient docking station that facilitated upload/download to manage phone numbers and held out the promise of coordinating calendars (the world needed first to decide what calendaring system it would standardize on and then develop the behaviors and processes to support the effort—a work that is still in progress). It used a pen in a way that was restricted enough to actually work. And it met the consumer pricepoint of being under $400. And that was it. People loved this thing. The technology industry management teams took the lead on it, but pretty quickly it was getting passed around to “the rest of us,” and the passion did not abate. It is one of the few products after the Mac that has been able to create passion among a broad class of users. Why? Because it just nailed the problem these folks have. Success through subtraction is the key lesson here. And that subtraction was made possible by a vote of confidence in design esthetics and in ta...