For about 15 seconds earlier this week I was mildly interested in Plurk. I signed up after reading Mark Evans’s blog post referencing another blog post, which indicated that the Twitter-esque service was spreading rapidly among early adopters. Actually it said “first adopters”, which was what really got me thinking.
There’s a certain bravado to being a first adopter, with its connotations of inside knowledge, risk and thought leadership, all of which I think absolutely don’t apply to anyone who does nothing more than experiment with a free, consumer-focused service.
When I first read Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm, it was one of the few non-fiction books that really resonated with me. Since I first read it in the late ’90s, it’s fallen out of fashion a little, in part because of concerns that its model for marketing new technology encourages start-ups to look too far upstream, worrying about the leap from early adopter to mainstream rather than from innovator to early adopter. Still I like the book’s core message about how new technologies find their market and succeed.
And I think it’s important to draw out that distinction between the kind of early adopters (and innovators, for that matter) that Moore refers to and those embracing the current generation of free web-based tools and services. Most of Moore’s examples are about the successful entry of new technologies into businesses and homes, in which those businesses were required to invest time and money and make risk-laden decisions to change the way things had historically been done. In short, most of the examples are about real selling to real customers, which is a hard enough thing to do in and of itself, and exponentially harder when the product is unproven.
Today’s self-proclaimed early adopters aren’t making decisions that could jeopardize their jobs, crater big projects in their departments, lose their businesses money, or cause any other substantial calamity. Instead they’re playing, which I think does nothing but encourage hordes of aspiring entrepreneurs to build things to grab a few seconds of attention and a little word-of-mouth among similarly casual users. It’s actually not at all easy to grab this attention, but it seems to me that the effort invested in doing so is mostly a waste of time and money.
I don’t mean to suggest that being the first to buy, for instance, an OLED TV is a particularly noble cause, but it’s certainly a leap of faith, the kind which promotes real economic progress and change. But it is hard in a different way to build a product or service that can change the way business is done, or displace an established piece of equipment from a consumer’s home. And I think the absence of such stories from the blogosphere is symptomatic of a community concerned more with discovering the new for its own sake than seeking out real innovation.
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