Crossing the Chasm
I’ve been reading Crossing the Chasm – Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers. It’s a classic, originally published in 1991, but the ideas are still valid today. The core point is that tech products may find early adopters, but it is not a smooth growth curve into the mainstream market. There is a huge chasm after the early adopters and before mainstream acceptance, in which many products and companies have fallen.
My Nokia E61 seems to be a perfect case in point. It is amazing - a fully functional web browser, email client with a keyboard and wifi. And it fits in my pocket. It’s a laptop replacement. Perfect for tech geeks and early adopters. That side of me loves it, but the part of me that just wants it to work smoothly and elegantly is less satisfied. (Some rough areas: Connecting to new WIFI networks is an ordeal. It didn’t know about the new daylight savings time change. It asks for my lock code at random intervals. It’s slow to open folders and applications. It needs periodic reboots…)
I would not recommend this phone to anyone who wasn’t interested in spending time learning how the thing works, or isn’t savvy at debugging problems. It’s just not ready for the mainstream market. I hope Nokia isn’t expecting sales to linearly rise, because it seems that once they have saturated the early adoptor market, they are going to fall into a deep chasm.
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April 10th, 2007 at 20:54
Hi,
I’m thinking of buying a Nokia E61.
Where did you buy yours? How are you making out without a built-in digital camera?
Keep on blogging…
Philippe
April 10th, 2007 at 21:21
I bought it in Toronto. Unlocked. (I think mine was made for the chinese market since it has a chinese character on the bottom right key.)
Yes, I wish it had a digital camera. I think the e61i (not released yet) will have one.