Yahoo Microsoft Deal

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

Preface to the Revised Edition

section on using "thematic niches" as a legitimate tactic for crossing the

chasm. It turns out instead they were a placeholder for the market tactics used

during a merging hypergrowth market, a challenge covered in a subsequent

book, Inside the Tornado. Also I have substituted a revised scenario process for

the original to incorporate improvements that have evolved over the past several

years of consulting at The Chasm Group. Elsewhere, I took a slightly new

angle on creating the competition and, when it came to the section on distribution,

I have done my best to incorporate the emerging influence of the

Internet.

But the overwhelming bulk of the changes in this new edition--representing

about a third of total text--simply swap out the original examples

from the 1980s with new ones from the 1990s. Surprisingly, in the majority

of cases this swap works very well. But in other cases, there's been a little forcefitting,

and I want to beg your indulgence up front. The world has changed.

The high-tech community is now crossing the chasm intentionally rather than

unintentionally, and there are now competitors who have read the same book

and create plans to block chasm-crossing. The basic forces don't change, but

the tactics have become more complicated.

Moreover, we are seeing a new effect which was just barely visible in the

prior decade, the piggybacking of one company's offer on another to skip the

chasm entirely and