Crossing the Chasm and over 360,000 other books are available for Amazon Kindle – Amazon’s new wireless reading device. Learn more

 

or
Sign in to turn on 1-Click ordering.
 
 
Express Checkout with PayPhrase
What's this? | Create PayPhrase
More Buying Choices
108 used & new from $4.20
Have one to sell? Sell yours here
 
   
Crossing the Chasm
 
 
See all product images
See 1 customer image
Share your own customer images
Search inside this book
Start reading Crossing the Chasm on your Kindle in under a minute.

Don’t have a Kindle? Get your Kindle here.
 
  

Crossing the Chasm (Paperback)

~ (Author) "There is a line from a song in the musical A Chorus Line: '"If Troy Donahue can be a movie star, then I can be..." (more)
Key Phrases: define the battle, pragmatist buyers, whole product manager, High-Tech Marketing Enlightenment, Assemble the Invasion Force, Getting Beyond the Chasm (more...)
4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (101 customer reviews)
List Price: $17.99
Price: $12.23 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. Details
You Save: $5.76 (32%)
o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o
In Stock.
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com. Gift-wrap available.

Want it delivered Wednesday, December 2? Choose One-Day Shipping at checkout. Details
Ordering for Christmas? To ensure delivery by December 24, choose Standard Shipping at checkout. Read more about holiday shipping.

41 new from $8.93 67 used from $4.20

Formats

Amazon Price New from Used from
  Kindle Edition, November 6, 2001 $9.99 -- --
  Paperback, July 31, 2002 $12.23 $8.93 $4.20

Frequently Bought Together

Crossing the Chasm + Inside the Tornado: Strategies for Developing, Leveraging, and Surviving Hypergrowth Markets + The Innovator's Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book that Will Change the Way You Do Business (Collins Business Essentials)
Price For All Three: $29.75

Show availability and shipping details

Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought

Inside the Tornado: Strategies for Developing, Leveraging, and Surviving Hypergrowth Markets

Inside the Tornado: Strategies for Developing, Leveraging, and Surviving Hypergrowth Markets

by Geoffrey A. Moore
4.3 out of 5 stars (40)  $5.29
The Chasm Companion: Implementing Effective Marketing Strategies for High-Technology Companies

The Chasm Companion: Implementing Effective Marketing Strategies for High-Technology Companies

by Paul Wiefels
4.2 out of 5 stars (8)  $18.21
The Innovator's Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book that Will Change the Way You Do Business (Collins Business Essentials)

The Innovator's Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book that Will Change the Way You Do Business (Collins Business Essentials)

by Clayton M. Christensen
4.4 out of 5 stars (174)  $12.23
Dealing with Darwin : How Great Companies Innovate at Every Phase of Their Evolution

Dealing with Darwin : How Great Companies Innovate at Every Phase of Their Evolution

by Geoffrey A. Moore
4.2 out of 5 stars (20)  $10.38
The Four Steps to the Epiphany

The Four Steps to the Epiphany

by Steven Gary Blank
4.9 out of 5 stars (55)  $39.99
› Explore similar items

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Author Geoffrey Moore makes the case that high-tech products require marketing strategies that differ from those in other industries. His chasm theory describes how high-tech products initially sell well, mainly to a technically literate customer base, but then hit a lull as marketing professionals try to cross the chasm to mainstream buyers. This pattern, says Moore, is unique to the high-tech industry.

Moore suggests remedies for the problem that can help businesses meet their long-term goals. He coaches marketing professionals on how to move slowly through the gulf, teaching them to create profiles and target specific segments of the population rather than trying to plow right into the mainstream. He cites examples of successful chasm crossings by such companies as Apple, Tandem, Oracle, and Sun, showing what they all had in common and exposing the different weaknesses in their strategies. Moore also assigns responsibility for success to programmers and developers by suggesting they design a "whole product model." Here, because integration tasks are daunting to the mainstream market, all the components of a technological product must be in one package. Moore also describes strategies for competing with rival companies and assessing the best distribution channels for penetrating the target market.

Written not just for marketing specialists but for all employees whose futures ride on the success of a technical product, Crossing the Chasm delivers crucial information in an engaging, readable tone. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.



From Scientific American

Moore provides an invaluable service to high-tech entrepreneurs and investors: he has identified the weak link in the marketing chain which makes the success of such ventures so unpredictable, and he outlines proven, specific techniques to address this challenge. At a time when the high-tech community in the U.S. cedes much of its once-held manufacturing advantage to the Far East and elsewhere, it is critical that these U.S. enterprises must retain superior marketing as a competitive advantage. Crossing the Chasm provides critical information for achieving this end.

About the Author:

Formerly a partner with Regis McKenna Inc., Geoffrey A. Moore is now president of his own firm, Geoffrey Moore Consulting, and founder of The Chasm Group. He has consulted with over 30 high tech corporations, including Hewlett-Packard, Apple, AT&T, Oracle, IBM, and Samsung. Moore is also the author of Inside the Tornado ) which details market dynamics of hypergrowth, and explains how to pool resources, gain supporters during pre-tornado phase, then how to unleash them once the tornado hits. He holds a degree in literature from Stanford University and the University of Washington. Moore is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and trade shows and also lectures at business schools, where Crossing the Chasm is often a required textbook. He lives with his wife Marie in Palo Alto, California. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

  • Paperback: 256 pages
  • Publisher: Harper Paperbacks; Revised edition (August 20, 2002)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0060517123
  • ISBN-13: 978-0060517120
  • Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.4 x 0.6 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 7.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (101 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.com Sales Rank: #13,552 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

    Popular in these categories: (What's this?)

    #12 in  Books > Business & Investing > Small Business & Entrepreneurship > New Business Enterprises
    #52 in  Books > Business & Investing > Marketing & Sales > Marketing

    •  Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?

More About the Author

Geoffrey A. Moore
Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

› Visit Amazon's Geoffrey A. Moore Page
Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Search Inside This Book:
Inside This Book (learn more)
First Sentence:
There is a line from a song in the musical A Chorus Line: '"If Troy Donahue can be a movie star, then I can be a movie star." Read the first page
Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
define the battle, pragmatist buyers, whole product manager, pragmatist customers, chasm period, beachhead segment, technology adoption life cycle, market segment manager, technology enthusiasts, economic buyer, crossing the chasm, technical buyer, mainstream market, selling partnerships, early market, discontinuous innovation
Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
High-Tech Marketing Enlightenment, Assemble the Invasion Force, Getting Beyond the Chasm, Launch the Invasion, Silicon Graphics, The D-Day Analogy, Target the Point of Attack, High-Tech Marketing Illusion, High-Tech Marketing Model, The Chasm Group, United States, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, Gold Club, Early Majority
New!
Books on Related Topics | Concordance | Text Stats
Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Search Inside This Book:
Citations (learn more)
This book cites 10 books:
See all 10 books this book cites
 
100 books cite this book:
See all 100 books citing this book

Books on Related Topics (learn more)
 
 

Tags Customers Associate with This Product

 (What's this?)
Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
 
(19)
(11)
(11)
(8)
(5)
(2)
(2)
(2)
(2)
(2)
Agree with these tags?
See all 33 tags...

Your tags: Add your first tag
 
See most popular tags
 

Customer Reviews

101 Reviews
5 star:
 (51)
4 star:
 (31)
3 star:
 (11)
2 star:
 (5)
1 star:
 (3)
 
 
 
 
 
Average Customer Review
4.2 out of 5 stars (101 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
Share your thoughts with other customers:
Most Helpful Customer Reviews

 
108 of 112 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars two good points, but a longwinded book, February 19, 2002
By Bob Carpenter (New York, NY) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers (Paperback)
Moore's primary point in this book is that the early adopters of a technology are not necessarily the same as the mainstream market. Moore points out that early adapters often buy things because they're cool, not for practical reasons. Early adapters deal with pain in the form of bad interfaces, minimal network effects. etc. Following this informal observation, Moore divides the population into innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards. This is his "Technology Adoption Life Cycle", of which the "underlying thesis is that technology is absorbed into any given community in stages corresponding to the psychological and social profiles of various segments within that market" (p. 15). He illustrates this with a bell curve with a horizontal axis corresponding to time of adoption. There's no explanation for why a Bell curve; I'm guessing it just looks pretty in PowerPoint. Moore continues with "this process can be thought of as a continuum with definite stages, each associated with a definable group" (p. 15), although actual definitions are notable by their absence. So Moore advises us that marketing to the two groups might have to be different. Complex? No. Obvious? Perhaps. In any case, this observation is followed with 185 pages of examples and pep talks which I found perfectly readable, but without much additional content.

The second point, which is really just as important, is that the way to "cross the chasm" is by targeting a single industry or group of users, a so-called "vertical market". The only way customers who are beyond the early adopter phase are going to buy into a new product is if it is easy to adopt or if it truly fills a perceived desperate need. That is, it looks less "disruptive". Usually this means a lot of custom integration with industry-specific infrastructure. It's easier to build something well integrated with existing, for say, just the airline industry and their SABRE database backend, than it is to try to target the entire Fortune 500, each sector of which has adopted different sorts of databases. It worked just the way Moore described for my company, where Moore's book was required reading.

You can get much more insight about sales and marekting (as well as finance and logistics) about disruptive technologies from Clayton Christensen's excellent "The Innovator's Dilemma". You can learn more about marketing segmentation and network effects from Shapiro and Varian's "Information Rules". I might be biased as both a techie and a recovering academic, but I liked the more heavily researched, serious case-study orientation as well as the precise, restrained, academic tone of these two books from business professors. On the other hand, Moore's book gives you an excellent feel for the seat of the pants consulting and hype side of the business world, which itself is a useful education.
Moore's book is breezy and highly readable. This is great can't-sleep-on-the-airplane material. And two good ideas are more than you get out of most pop business books.

Comment Comment (1) | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)



 
71 of 82 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars great idea but could be summarized in one sentence, September 5, 2000
By Philip Greenspun (Cambridge, MA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This review is from: Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers (Paperback)
This book illustrates a fault in the publishing industry. If you have a 50-page idea it is too long for a magazine. But it is too short for a book. So if you wanted to get it distributed before the Web came along, you had to drop in words until you reached 200 pages.

Here is Moore's important insight in one sentence: "Don't celebrate your victory in a market after becoming the market leader with pioneer consumers; as the mass market develops and all the competitive offerings have adequate performance, the new consumers won't care about the advanced features that your organization is exquisitely tuned to produce but rather ease of setup, ease of use, and low cost."

Comment Comment (1) | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)



 
45 of 51 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Two Immensely Helpful Companions, May 2, 2000
By Robert Morris (Dallas, Texas) - See all my reviews
(TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)      
This review is from: Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers (Paperback)
Crossing the Chasm (1991) and Inside the Tornado (1995) aremost valuable when read in combination. Chasm "is unabashedly aboutand for marketing within high-tech enterprises." It was written forthe entire high tech community "to open up the marketing decision making during this [crossing] period so that everyone on the management team can participate in the marketing process." In Chasm, Moore isolates and then corrects what he describes as a "fundamental flaw in the prevailing high-tech marketing model": the notion that rapid mainstream growth could follow continuously on the heels of early market success.

In his subsequent book, Inside the Tornado, Moore's use of the "tornado" metaphor correctly suggests that turbulence of unprecedented magnitude has occurred within the global marketplace which the WWW and the Internet have created. Moreover, such turbulence is certain to intensify. Which companies will survive? Why? I have only one (minor) quarrel with the way these two books have been promoted. True, they provide great insights into marketing within the high technology industry. However, in my opinion, all e-commerce (and especially B2B) will be centrally involved in that industry. Moreover, the marketing strategies suggested are relevant to virtually (no pun intended) any organization -- regardless of size or nature -- which seeks to create or increase demand for what it sells...whatever that may be. I consider both books "must reading."

Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)


Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
 
 
 
Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Perfect for professionals dealing with discontinuous innovation
There are very few texts that do a good job dealing with how to convince the market to adopt new technologies. Read more
Published 2 months ago by RJC

5.0 out of 5 stars A guide to understanding company development and growth
In financing companies, it is critical to think about the stage and progress of the business. Crossing the Chasm provides a framework to understand some of the key dimensions in... Read more
Published 2 months ago by Kenneth H. Marks

1.0 out of 5 stars crossing the chasm
The book arrived in poor condition. Many of the pages of print were missing so pages were glued in. It's poor quality. Some pages were put in crooked, folded over and stained.
Published 3 months ago by Allison L. Lindsay

4.0 out of 5 stars Don't waste time on late adopters - with any new idea
This business book captures in a few pages my over arching outlook on how change happens in the world (and just so happens to be a good way to approach launching high tech... Read more
Published 5 months ago by Brett

2.0 out of 5 stars Too Many Obsolete References
While I found the first 20 or so pages of this book helpful in a general sense, the author made too many references to obsolete or no long existant software companies. Read more
Published 10 months ago by J. Kaverman

5.0 out of 5 stars Must read for anyone in high tech marketing
For a book on high tech that was first published nearly two decades ago to feel so relevant today is a testament to the ideas and writing of Geoffrey Moore. Read more
Published 12 months ago by Paul R. Pettengill

3.0 out of 5 stars Worth reading
Nutshell review - An interesting concept and well written book describing how companies need to make the jump from the early adopters of their products to main-stream users in... Read more
Published 17 months ago by Jos Pols

4.0 out of 5 stars Surprisingly Real
It is amazing how this book describes, through real examples, they key role that the marketing plays in the massive adoption of a technology. Read more
Published 19 months ago by Jose C. Martin Marco

5.0 out of 5 stars Crossing the Chasm
I've bought copies of Crossing the Chasm for two customers and one associate. I guess that means I'm impressed. Read more
Published 23 months ago by D. stonier-gibson

5.0 out of 5 stars How companies "grow up"
Having already read the sequel, Inside the Tornado, I wondered whether this book had essentially been summarized in that one. Read more
Published on November 4, 2007 by Eric Kassan

Only search this product's reviews


Customer Discussions

This product's forum
Discussion Replies Latest Post
No discussions yet

Ask questions, Share opinions, Gain insight
Start a new discussion
Topic:
First post:
Prompts for sign-in
 


Active discussions in related forums
Discussion Replies Latest Post
technology
China incline USA decline? 		0 7 days ago
Search Customer Discussions
Search all Amazon discussions
   

Product Information from the Amapedia Community

Beta (What's this?)

Look for Similar Items by Category

Look for Similar Items by Subject

Search Books by subject:















i.e., each book must be in subject 1 AND subject 2 AND ...
 

Feedback

If you need help or have a question for Customer Service, contact us.
 Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
Is there any other feedback you would like to provide?

Your comments can help make our site better for everyone.


Your Recent History

 (What's this?)

After viewing product detail pages or search results, look here to find an easy way to navigate back to pages you are interested in.