Adopter Categories (Moore's Revision)

Moore's most important theoretical move was reinterpreting Everett Rogers's 1962 adopter categories. Rogers identified five groups — innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, laggards — distributed across a bell curve of adoption timing. Rogers treated the groups as differing in degree: each group faster or slower than the next along a single continuum. Moore argued the groups were qualitatively different populations operating inside incompatible evaluation frameworks. The gaps between them were not smooth transitions but structural discontinuities — chasms — across which marketing that worked for one group actively failed for the next. This restructuring transformed an academic taxonomy into a strategic framework that has shaped three decades of technology commercialization.