Essay About Enough Opportunity And Appeal Of The Book

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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 wasnt 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 well 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, Ive 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 wasnt 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
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, theres 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 dont 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 companys offer on another to skip the
chasm entirely and