CROSSING THE CHASM. Copyright © 1991 by Geoffrey A. Moore. All rights reserved under
International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees,
you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text
of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-
loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information
storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechani-
cal, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of
PerfectBound™.
PerfectBound ™ and the PerfectBound™ logo are trademarks of HarperCollins Publishers.
Adobe Acrobat E-Book Reader edition v 1. October 2001
ISBN 0-06-018987-8
The original hardcover edition of this book was published in 1991 by HarperBusiness, a
division of HarperCollins Publishers.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To
Marie
Contents
PREFACE TO THE REVISED EDITION
FOREWORD
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
PART I
Discovering the Chasm
INTRODUCTION
If Bill Gates Can Be a Billionaire
1 High-Tech Marketing Illusion
2 High-Tech Marketing Enlightenment
PART II
Crossing the Chasm
3 The D-Day Analogy
v
vi
Contents
4 Target the Point of Attack
5 Assemble the Invasion Force
6 Define the Battle
7
Launch the Invasion
CONCLUSION
Getting Beyond the Chasm
About the Author
Credits
About the Publisher
Front Cover
Preface to the Revised Edition
“Obiwan Kenobi,” says Sir Alec Guinness in the original Star Wars movie—
“Now there’s a name I haven’t heard for a long, long time.”
The same might well be said of a number of the companies that served as
examples in the original edition of Crossing the Chasm. Reading through its
index brings to mind the medieval lament, “Where are the snows of yester-
year?” Where indeed are Aldus, Apollo, Ashton-Tate, Ask, Burroughs,
Businessland, and the Byte Shop? Where are Wang, Weitek, and Zilog? “Oh
lost and by the wind-grieved ghosts, come back again!”
But we should not despair. In high tech, the good news is that, although
we lose our companies with alarming frequency, we keep the people along
with the ideas, and so the industry as a whole goes forward vibrantly, even as
the names on our paychecks slide into another seamlessly (OK, as seamlessly
as our systems interoperate, which as marketing claims is… well that’s anoth-
er matter).
Crossing the Chasm was written in 1990 and published in 1991. Originally
forecast to sell 5,000 copies, it has over a seven year period in the market sold
more than 175,000. In high-tech marketing, we call this an “upside miss.”
The appeal of the book, I believe, is that it puts a vocabulary to a market
development problem that has given untold grief to any number of high-tech
enterprises. Seeing the problem externalized in print has a sort of redemptive
effect on people who have fallen prey to it in the past—it wasn’t all my fault!
Moreover, like a good book on golf, its prescriptions give great hope that just
by making this or that minor adjustment perfect results are bound to follow—
this time we’ll make it work! And so any number of people cheerfully have
told me that the book has become the Bible in their company. So much for
the spiritual health of our generation.
In editing this revised edition, I have tried to touch as little as possible the
logic of the original. This is harder than you might think because over the past
decade my views have changed (all right, I’ve become older), and I have an
inveterate tendency to meddle, as any number of my clients and colleagues
will testify. The problem is, when you meddle, you get in deeper and deeper
until God knows what you have, but it wasn’t what you started with. I have
plenty enough opportunity to do that with future books, and I have enough
respect for this one to try to stand off a bit.
That being said, I did make a few significant exceptions. I eliminated the
vii