Crossing the Chasm

Mainstream markets in high tech look a lot like mainstream markets in any

other industry, particularly those that sell business to business. They are dominated

by the early majority, who in high tech are best understood as pragmatists,

who, in turn, tend to be accepted as leaders by the late majority, best

thought of as conservatives, and rejected as leaders by the laggards, or skeptics.

As in the previous chapter, we are going to look closely at how the psychographics

of each of these groups influences the development and dynamics of

a high-tech market.

Early Majority: The Pragmatists

Throughout the 1980s, the early majority, or pragmatists, have represented

the bulk of the market volume for any technology product. You can succeed

30 CROSSING THE CHASM

with the visionaries, and you can thereby get a reputation for being a high

flyer with a hot product, but that is not ultimately where the dollars are.

Instead, those funds are in the hands of more prudent souls, who do not want

to be pioneers ("Pioneers are people with arrows in their backs"), who never

volunteer to be an early test site ("Let somebody else debug your product"),

and who have learned the hard way that the "leading edge" of technology is

all too often the "bleeding edge."

Who are the pragmatists? Actually, important as they are, they are hard to

characterize because they do not have the visionary's penchant for drawing

attention to themselves. They are not the Hamlets but the Horatios, not the

Don Quixotes but the Sancho Panzas, a character more like the X-File's Dana

Scully than Fox Mulder, more like Lethal Weapon's Sergeant Murtaugh than

Martin Riggs--people who do not assert a position in life so much as derive

one from what life provides. Never the standout, they are what makes for the

continuity, so that after the star either dies (tragedy) or rides off into the sunset

(heroic romance, comedy), they are left to clean up and to answer the

inevitable final question: Who was that masked man?

In the realm of high tech, pragmatist CEOs are not common, and those

there are, true to their type, tend to keep a relatively low profile. Ray Lane of

Oracle (as opposed to Larry Ellison), Craig Barrett of Intel (as opposed to

Andy Grove), Lew Platt of Hewlett-Packard (as opposed to Scott McNealy at

Sun), and Carol Bartz on Autodesk all come to mind. They tend to be best

known by their closest colleagues, from whom they typically have earned the

highest respect, and by their peers within their industry, where they show up

near the top of the leader board year after year.

Of course, to market successfully to pragmatists, one does not have to be

one--just understand their values and work to serve them. To look more

closely into these values, if the goal of visionaries is to take a quantum leap

forward, the goal of pragmatists is to make a percentage improvement--incremental,

measurable, predictable progress. If they are installing a new product,

they want to know how other people have fared with it. The word risk is a negative

word in their vocabulary--it does not connote opportunity or excitement

but rather the chance to waste money and time. They will undertake

risks when required, but they first will put in place safety nets and manage the

risks very closely.

The Fortune 2000 MIS community, as a group, is led by people who are

largely pragmatist in orientation. Business demands for increased productivity

push them toward the front of the adoption life cycle, but natural prudence

and budget restrictions keep them cautious. As individuals, pragmatists held

back from buying Windows until Release 3.0, held back from client/server

applications until PeopleSoft, Oracle, and SAP gave three safe choices, and are

still trying to figure out today how far to let the Internet into their corporate

environments.

If pragmatists are hard to win over, they are loyal once won, often enforcing

a company standard that requires the purchase of your product, and only your

product, for a given requirement. This focus on standardization is, well, pragmatic,

in that it simplifies internal service demands. But the secondary effects

of this standardization--increasing sales volumes and lowering the cost of

High Tech Marketing Enlightenment 31

sales--is dramatic. Hence the importance of pragmatists as a market segment.

The most celebrated example and beneficiary of this effect in the last

decade has been Microsoft. We tend to think of Microsoft's dominance in

operating systems as exclusive today, but actually, as the desktop and workgroup

server markets were