Unleashing the Ideavirus

Unleashing the Ideavirus
151
 www.ideavirus.com
Email didn’t ask the fax companies if it was okay with them if a new, instant, permanent,
digital communications tool came along and wrecked the fax business. Matchmaker.com
didn’t hold meetings with the extremely profitable video dating services out there to find out
if it was okay for them to launch. Who cares if Matchmaker.com never makes money? What
matters to the existing businesses is that these new kids on the block have wrecked the
business landscape for the old providers.
Giving digital media away is a reality. Non-dominant players in any industry will always
succeed more by giving away digital content and then profiting later than they will by
holding back to preserve somebody else’s business model.
It was a mistake for the record companies to fight radio and MTV. It’s a mistake for them to
fight Napster. Rather than fighting to patch the leaky bucket, perhaps they could redefine
their roles so they can figure out how to profit from a “free” world.

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Unleashing the Ideavirus
152
 www.ideavirus.com
Crossing The Chasm With An Ideavirus
In his brilliant book, 
Crossing the Chasm
, Geoffrey Moore unleashed a powerful ideavirus
about how new businesses and new ideas get spread. Basically, there’s a chasm in the product
adoption cycle.
The curve used to look like this:
On the left are early adopters, the nerds who love new stuff, who want to get their hands on
anything neat and potentially wonderful. On the right are the laggards, who are still having
trouble getting rid of their steam engine cars.
The meat is obviously in the center. That’s where the vast majority of us live, and where the
combination of big audience and pretty decent pricing is most attractive to a marketer.
In the old days, people believed that you could introduce a product to the early adopters, use
the high profits from those sales to ramp up production and advertising, and then roll the
product out to the masses.
There’s a problem with this view: there’s a gap in the curve. A chasm.

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