Should we rethink 'Crossing The Chasm' or technology marketing?

ReadWriteWeb has an interesting article on Rethinking Geoffrey Moore's 'Crossing The Chasm'. I did love that book way back when it was sorta kinda new (it was already several years old when I got ahold of it in mid-1990s). But ReadWriteWeb asserts that perhaps it needs updating:

The problem is that compared to a few years ago, the speed with which new technologies are coming to the market has increased dramatically. All these technologies are aimed at the early adopters. And they love it and they try it. But the question is what happens when your early adopters run off to play with a new great thing before you have a chance to take your technology mainstream?

For example, some people who used to blog regularly, blog less now because they discovered Twittering (microblogging). Or, early adopters who have discovered Second Life might not have as much time to spend on MySpace anymore. These are not even necessarily competitive technologies, they are complimentary, but the fact is that they all compete for peoples' time and attention.

It is an interesting theory -- namely, that the fast pace of technology is outrunning society's ability to adopt it -- but in my opinion, the author leaves out an important aspect of the book. Geoffrey Moore asserted that to convince the early majority (the folks after the early adopters), you needed to build "the whole product", i.e., a complete solution to a real-life problem with all the necessary pieces to deliver all the value of the solution, not just a technology. But for most of the technology-centric developers, the concept of actually doing what a large community of people really want runs counter to their whole way of thinking, especially when they focus their efforts mostly on the early adopter avant garde. The result: they miss the early majority, not because the early adopters are too distracted or busy, but because they never built something that the early majority wanted anyway.

The other factor that the article leaves out is the concept of identifying a target market of early majority users. Too many technology companies believe that their market is, "consumers" or "large businesses that buy software". Sorry, those aren't markets, or at least not actionable ones. A real market is one where you can identify a clean list of prospective customers or buyers where each person on the list has a reasonable chance of actually wanting to buy your product because it solves a problem or satisfies a need for them. The question I always ask someone who thinks they have a market identified is, "How would I generate a list of 100 phone numbers of people in that market to call to test your product with?"

Personally, I think Moore's book has just as much value today as it did in 1991. The entire thesis of the book was to identify the marketing problems that keep most technologies from becoming business successes. Most of those challenges are still out there -- it's technology marketing, not the book, that needs to change.

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