Now Everyone Has to Cross the Chasm

How do you "cross the chasm" as a technology startup? There can be very few high-tech entrepreneurs and investors who are unaware of Geoffrey Moore's book, Crossing the Chasm and its follow-up titles. Moore has identified the challenges that face technology innovators as they progress along the bell-curve of technology adoption, none of them more daunting than the chasm that lies between gaining success among early adopters and translating that into success in the mainstream market.

Moore's theory applies twice over to startups who propose to deliver their application as a service rather than shipping it as a product. Not only do they have to cross the chasm for their own product; the ASP delivery model itself has to cross the chasm into the mainstream.

BizTone.com is just such a startup. It has built a complete enterprise resource planning (ERP) application suite from scratch for delivery over the Internet as a service. ASPnews.com first covered BizTone.com in Mar 1999 - see BizTone.com challenges ERP conventions.

So how is BizTone.com going to simultaneously cross both of those chasms? CEO Darryl Carlton has come up with a novel solution. His sales team goes out to prospective partners and customers armed with a presentation that combines Moore's chasm theory with the ideas of another best-selling business author - Clayton Christensen. Coincidentally, it was only last week that Gartner's Ben Pring described Christensen's theories in a column on this site - see Exploiting An Age of Disruption, Jul 6th 2000.

The essence of Christensen's thesis is that there are two types of technology innovation. Most fall into the category of sustaining technologies, which enhance the performance of established product lines. Occasionally, however, disruptive technologies come along which - although they start off seeming to provide worse performance - ultimately displace the established market leaders.

Carlton's presentation shows what happens when Christensen's disruptive technologies meet Moore's chasm-pocked bell curves. He shows three successive bell curves of disruptive technology adoption - mainframe computing, client-server computing and Internet computing. As each peaks, the next begins. And as each new disruptive technology crosses the chasm from its early market into the mainstream majority , it is the big names from the previous technology wave that plummet into the chasm.

"In a disruptive change, everybody has to cross the chasm together, not just the new entrants," Carlton concludes. And, he adds, in the struggle to get across, "the existing market leaders always lose."

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