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.
In the AI Story
Rogers developed the original framework through studies of how Iowa farmers adopted hybrid corn seed. He found that adoption followed a bell curve and that the segments differed in social network position, education, risk tolerance, and communication patterns. The model was descriptive and empirically grounded, but Rogers treated the differences as variations in degree rather than kind.
Moore's insight was that the differences were categorical for discontinuous innovations — technologies requiring substantial change in how users work. For continuous innovations (a better cornfield seed, a faster car), adoption flowed smoothly across segments because the use model remained stable. For discontinuous innovations (the personal computer, AI), the use model itself had to change, and the segments differed not in how quickly they could absorb the change but in whether they would absorb it at all under any circumstances.
This distinction generated the chasm — specifically, the widest chasm, between visionaries (early adopters) and pragmatists (early majority). It also generated the smaller but real chasms between other segments: between pragmatists and conservatives (late majority), and between conservatives and skeptics (laggards). Each chasm required its own whole product to cross. No technology automatically flowed from one segment to the next.
The Geoffrey Moore — On AI volume applies the restructured taxonomy to the AI transition. Developers and consumer chat users, mostly innovators and early adopters, have crossed. Enterprise knowledge workers, largely pragmatists, are hesitating. The late majority (risk-averse institutions, regulated industries, professional services with strong identity structures) watches the pragmatists for reference. Laggards — the philosophers and senior practitioners warning about what is being lost — are standing outside the adoption curve, often holding the most diagnostic information about what the whole product is missing.
Origin
Everett Rogers established the five-segment framework in Diffusion of Innovations (1962). Moore revised the framework in Crossing the Chasm (1991), transforming it from a descriptive sociology into a strategic framework for technology marketing.
Key Ideas
The segments are populations, not points on a continuum. Visionaries and pragmatists differ in kind, not just in speed.
Discontinuous innovations encounter structural gaps. The chasms between segments are discontinuities that require their own crossing strategy.
Each segment has its own compelling reason to buy. The motivation that works for one group actively fails for the next.
Reference propagation respects segment boundaries. Pragmatists reference other pragmatists, not visionaries.
Laggards often hold diagnostic information. Their refusal is sometimes precision about what is being lost, not mere conservatism.
Appears in the Orange Pill Cycle
Further reading
- Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations (1962; fifth edition 2003)
- Geoffrey A. Moore, Crossing the Chasm (1991)
- Jakob Nielsen, 'A Swarm of Adoption Curves' (2025)