A while back I wrote about all the so-called Chasms. These days we begin our continuous innovations in the late mainstreet. Nobody crosses the Chasm.
I was working on watching a data from a pseudorandom generator for a normal distribution converge to a normal. That is supposed to happen by the time you have 36 data points. It didn’t happen. And, it didn’t happen by the time I plotted 50 data points. It didn’t help that I had to generate more data after the first 36 data points.
I made a mistake. Each call of the generator starts the process off with a new seed, aka a new distribution, so of course, it doesn’t converge. I’m not liking this dataset mindset of statistics. I’m not p hunting. I’m trying to validate a decision made in the Agile development process. I don’t have all day, but apparently, I have a week. Claims about fast discovery turn out to be bunk. A friend of mine suggested taking a Bayesian approach instead.
Through some, now forgotten thought process, I was plotting sigmas and z-scores, et all. That brought me back to some details of the technology adoption lifecycle (TALC). So I Googled it and found a whole lot of graphs of it that were just flat out wrong. No wonder everyone is confused about the Chasm. They are using one of the revised (wrongly drawn) figures. So I’ll show you some of the figures, point out the errors, and draw an older more correct view.
The misstatements seem to be sourced from Geoffrey Moore. When he moved into the late phases when the dot bust happened, he set about making the TALC relevant to the late phases and the biz orthodoxy. He has taken back most of the claims he made in his prior version of the TALC. It’s all disappointing.
One thing Moore said back in the beginning of his TALC, not Rodger’s version, was that it was was not a clock. I always thought he meant not an asynchronous clock, aka not like email. No, what he meant was we can choose to enter any phase we want. That leaves money on the table, but it accurately reflected what businesses do. This very characteristic means that businesses can completely skip the Chasm, the bowling alley, and his first tornado. Yes, some acquiring companies skip the second tornado or just suck at it so the acquisition fails. Mostly, acquisitions don’t even try to succeed. The VCs got their exit, that being the whole point of most VC investments these days.
Once you skip over the processes that are Moore’s contribution to technology adoption, people feel free to just fall back to Rodgers, a solely sociological collection of populations. Moore took Rodgers someplace else. Yes, Rodgers didn’t see the Chasm. But, Moore didn’t see Myerson’s Poisson games. The underlying model changed over time. I’ve modified the model myself. But, Moore’s processes didn’t move.
So let’s look at the mess.

Figures from
- joshuafisher.com
- http://www.startify7.eu/wiki/technology-adoption-lifecycle
- software.homeaway.com
- wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d3/Technology- Adoption-Lifecycle.png
- researchgate.net
I’m just citing the sources of the figures. They probably copied them from others that copied them. I’m not assigning blame. But, this very small sample demonstrates the sources of confusion about the Chasm.
Problems:
- In figures 1, 2, 3, and 5, the first phase is called “Innovators.” Well, no. The inventors happened a long time before the technology adoption lifecycle began. The word innovators are indicative of management. In the earlier texts, this population was called technical enthusiasts. They are engineers, not business people. And, in the bowling alley and vertical sense, they were programmers known to the early adopter for the given vertical.
- In figure 2, the gray graph behind the technology adoption lifecycle has an axis labeled “Market Share.” No, in no way is a technology firm allowed to capture 100% of the market share. The maximum is 74%. After that, you have a monopoly and your business is in violation of antitrust law. The EU is probably stricter than the US. That 74% is the US threshold.
- In figures 1, 2, 3, and 5, the second phase is called the “Early Adopters.” Under Moore’s version, this phase is more accurately called the bowling alley. It is where we sell into the vertical markets by selling to one B2B early adopter in each vertical. We would enter six verticals with a product conceived by the early adopter. That product would be built on the technology we are trying to get adopted. Products are just the means of getting the underlying technology adopted. The product visualization is the early adopter’s alone. The idea is not ours. We sell to six early adopters. This takes time. There is no hurry. We have to ensure that each of these six early adopters achieves their intended business advantage.
- The population percentages for each phase are accurate in figure 3.
- In figure 4, the Chasm is correctly placed, but the early adopters are to the left, aka before the Chasm, and their vertical is to the right. It is not accurate to call the entire phase where the Chasm occurs the early adopters. There is a two-degrees-of-separation network between the early adopter and their vertical. Sales reps find no particular advantage in attempting to sell to a third degree of separation. Selling to that network constitutes the central issue of the Chasm.
- Figure 4 also splits the early and late majorities in the wrong place.
- In figure 5, the Chasm is incorrectly placed. The Early Majority is really the horizontal, usually the IT horizontal. The Tornado sits at the entrance of this phase, the horizontal, not the Chasm. The Chasm sits at the entrance of the verticals.
One of the problems that Moore encountered was the inability of managers to know where they were in the TALC. These figures do not agree with each other, so how would managers using different versions come to agree.
I’ve made my own changes to the TALC. First, the left convergence of the normal is well after the R&D, aka science and engineering research that firms no longer engage in. The left convergence is long after the research has gained bibliographic maturity. The left convergence only happens when researchers with Ph.D.’s and master’s degrees decide to innovate after having invented. They happen long before the TALC. This doesn’t look like how we innovate these days. These days we innovate in the late phases and innovate in a scientific and engineering-free idea-driven manner with design thinking innovating around the thinnest of ideas. These early phases, the phase before the late majority start with discontinuous innovation. These days in the phases after the early majority we innovate continuously. We don’t try to change the world. We are happy to fit in and replicate as directed by the advertising-driven VCs. The VCs demand exits so quickly that we couldn’t change the world if we wanted to.
The second change was in the placement of the technical enthusiasts. They are a layer below the entire TALC. They are the market in the IT horizontal. But, they work everywhere.
The third change involves integration with my software as media model. Each phase changes its role as a media. A media has a carrier and some carried content. All software involves the stuff used to model, and the content being modeled. Artists use pens, inks, paints, bushes, and paper. Developers use hardware, software, code, … Artists deliver a message. Developers deliver a message at times more obvious than at other times.
The fourth change is my labeling the laggards as the device market and the phobics as the cloud. I do this because these populations do not want their technology use to be obvious. The phobics use technology all the time, but with deniability. They use their car, not the computer that runs the car. Task sublimation and pragmatism organize the TALC. The phobics get peak task sublimation. This is where the technology disappears completely outside of the technical enthusiast population.
Here is a revised view of the TALC that incorporates my extensions and changes.

The end is near. The underlying technologies disappear at the convergence on the right. Then, we will need new categories that we can only build from discontinuous innovation. If you don’t read the journals, you won’t see it coming. And, if you spent your life doing continuous innovation, you won’t be able to innovate discontinuously.
Another figure out on Google correlates Gartner’s Hype Cycle with the TALC. But, this
one is absolutely wrong. Gartner has nothing to say about technologies in the vertical. Gartner starts with the IT horizontal. If the horizontal is not the IT horizontal, Gartner has nothing to do with the TALC. The Chasm happens a long time before the Trough of Disillusionment. The Hype Cycle starts at the tornado that sits at the entry into the IT horizontal.
I’ve made the necessary adjustment in the following figure. The Hype Cycle does
manifest itself in the IT Horizontal and all subsequent phases. One Hype Cycle does not cross from one TALC phase to another. Each phase has its own hype cycle. I’ve only shown the hype cycle for the IT Horizontal.
The original figure was found in a Google image search. It was sourced from foundersresearch.com.
The reason I moved the Hypecycle is that in the search for clients in the vertical, IT is specifically omitted, and IT is not involved in the project. The client has to have enough pull to keep IT out. The clients would be managers of business units or functional units other than the eventual intended horizontal that you would enter in the next phase. The Chasm and the earlier adopter problems discussed relative to earlier graphics is apparent here.
The second tornado came up in Moore’s post web 1.0 work. It happens after a purchase but before integration. The VCs get their money on completion of the purchase. The acquiring company gets value from the M&A only after the integration attempt succeeds. The AT&T acquisition of DirectTV had a very long tornado. That tornado is probably done by now. Most M&As fail. Many M&As are done solely to ensure the VCs recover their money. These are not done because the acquired company will generate a return for the acquirer. The underlying company fades into oblivion shortly after the acquisition. I’ve put both tornados in the next graphic. The timing of the M&A is independent of phase.

In most figures, the acquiring company is shown moving upwards from the M&A. That is incorrect. The acquiring company is post-peak, post early majority and is in permanent decline. The best that can happen is that the convergence on the right will be moved further to the right granting the acquirer more time before the category dies. The green area in the figure reflects the gains from a successful integration, which happens to require a successful second tornado.
What was not shown was the relation of the first tornado to an IPO that pays a premium. That only happens with discontinuous innovation, and only in the early phases of the TALC. With the innovations we do these days, we are in the late phases of the TALC, so there is no premium on the IPO. Facebook did not get a premium on their IPO.
One aspect of today’s TALC that I have not worked out is how the stack of the IT horizontal is cannibalized by the cloud.
Back when I gave my SlideShare presentation in Seattle in 2009, a lot of people didn’t feel that the TALC was relevant. It was still relevant then. It is still relevant now. We leave much money on the table by rushing, by being where everyone else is, by quoting the leaders of the early phases while we work in the late phases. We settle for cash, instead of the economic wealth garnered by changing the world. If we set out to change the world, the TALC is the way.
Enjoy.