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Crossing the Chasm
Moore's 1991 landmark identifying the gap between early adopters and the pragmatic mainstream that kills most technology ventures before they reach scale.
Crossing the Chasm, published in 1991, transformed Everett Rogers's diffusion-of-innovations research into an actionable strategic framework for technology marketing. Moore's central argument is that between each adopter segment in Rogers's bell curve there exists a discontinuity — and the largest, the one that kills most promising technologies, sits between visionaries and pragmatists. The book introduced the whole product model, the beachhead strategy, and the reference customer concept. Three decades later, its vocabulary remains the default strategic language of Silicon Valley go-to-market planning. In the Geoffrey Moore — On AI volume, the book functions as the foundational text from which every subsequent analytical move derives.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The book arose from Moore's consulting work at Regis McKenna's firm in the late 1980s, where he observed that companies with superior technology were consistently losing to companies with inferior technology but better market strategy. The pattern was too regular to be accidental, and Moore traced it to a specific structural feature of technology adoption: the psychological incompatibility