Scobleizer - Latest Comments in Early adopter angst

Re: Early adopter angst

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Re: Early adopter angst

diordna — Thu, 08 May 2008 14:10:29 -0000

You want to see some real early adopters? How about getting internet in to place where there was not even a phone line. These early adopter exist in many forms, have a look at these people;
http://www.horizonlanka.org/

Re: Early adopter angst

Toby Beavers — Sun, 04 May 2008 13:40:17 -0000

The Google brand is becoming a mainstay in everyone's daily vocabulary. Eventually the term 'to Google" will be a word in the Merriam-Webster dictionary.

So it's sad how lazy and inefficient MSN & Yahoo are. They have the funds but not the balls to move quickly and change.

We use PPC on all 3 and Google is by far the easiest to work with. Sad but true. We're watching though...

Re: Early adopter angst

Robert Scoble — Sat, 03 May 2008 14:02:08 -0000

Christopher: how did Toyota get the brand position it did? By appealing to early adopters. Heck, let's look at just the Prius. It has such a strong brand position among early adopters that other hybrids are having trouble getting recognized as hybrids.

Britney Spears? Celebrities are BUILT by appealing to early adopters first. http://www.hypem.com for you bud. Not to mention that she, when she was fairly popular and not all doped up, would get paid up to $100,000 just to show up to a bar for 10 minutes. Why? Cause that would kick off the influence networks.

I'm talking about how things get popular. You're talking about things that already are popular. Big difference.

Re: Early adopter angst

Christopher Coulter — Sat, 03 May 2008 13:47:51 -0000

If they were the ones who drive society as you suggest

Microsoft wouldn't even exist. Toyota wouldn't be #1. Bennie Babies wouldn't have been a fad. 'Walker, Texas Ranger' wouldn't have made it beyond its first showing. 'Murder She Wrote' wouldn't continue to rerun-forever torture us. Kitsch and Pop Art wouldn't exist. WalMart wouldn't be, nor would ANY of the paperbacks they (dare to) sell. Motorcycle Clubs wouldn't be. Britney Spears wouldn't have ever sold a single record. No one would dare read People Magazine.

I mean, I could fill a book, evidences of mass-culture dominance are ALL AROUND US, yet Scoble in his blind-cult-walk can't manage to see a single one.

Pop culture varies greatly from society elitist-culture, anyone with a 9 volts worth of juice could tell you that.

Re: Early adopter angst

Tony Hsieh - CEO Zappos.com — Sat, 03 May 2008 12:55:21 -0000

We've been making a big push internally to get employees signed up on Twitter and using it. In just a few weeks, we now have over 250 employees on Twitter:

http://twitter.zappos.com/e...

Most of our employees are not normally early adopters. But because we've been making a big push internally, and Twitter is more useful when you have friends using it, a lot of employees have really embraced Twitter whereas on their own without other people at Zappos participating they probably would not have. You can see our employees' Twitter activity here:

http://twitter.zappos.com/e...

It's a lot of ongoing chatter, compared to almost no chatter just a few weeks ago. I sent out an email to employees to this getting started guide I wrote:

http://twitter.zappos.com/s...

Most of the rest of our employees' Twitter activity happened on its own.

Starting next week, we are offering Twitter 101 classes at our headquarters (we are in Vegas, not Silicon Valley) to get even more employees to sign up. So I guess all I'm saying is that there are ways to get normally late adopters to become early adopters, and it doesn't have to be very hard or very expensive.

Re: Early adopter angst

Mike — Fri, 02 May 2008 23:32:08 -0000

You really think Neil Young with that classic acoustic guitar is driving society? ;-)

Come on... these are just tools. You don't need the latest shiny object to have "passion".

Re: Early adopter angst

Parliament — Fri, 02 May 2008 21:02:30 -0000

LOL. Twitter users are "leading society!" Still a douchebad, eh Robert?

Re: Early adopter angst

folkrockgirl — Fri, 02 May 2008 14:09:37 -0000

I think the label "early adopter" is being defined far too loosely here. What you are largely referring to are initial users of a product or service. Of course anything new, whether it succeeds in the long term or not, is going to have someone who tries it first. Early adopters, on the other hand, are individuals willing to take huge risks (in time, money, convenience) to embrace a novel technology. They quite often have a hand in the development of the project and, if it meets their needs satisfactorily, can be important opinion influencers.

I would not characterize the initial users of Twitter and FriendFeed as early adopters. Neither service is first in their respective technologies. There have been Twitter-like platforms and social feed aggregators in existence for quite some time and with far more technical sophistication. What makes these two later-movers stand out is their incredible simplicity and ease of adoption. Thus, users tend to fit the profile of an early majority rather than visionaries, with a narrow chasm between them and the only real barrier being the network effect. This is where the angst you speak of comes from.

As much as I value the innovators and nerds out there (I consider myself to be among them), I think you give far too much credit to your "early adopters." If they were the ones who drive society as you suggest, then VHS would not have beaten out Betamax and MySpace would not be so popular today.

Re: Early adopter angst

Danny — Fri, 02 May 2008 13:15:49 -0000

aureliusmaximus, I completely agree. I was simply answering Scoble's challenge to name a service that didn't go through an early adopter phase. I somehow doubt prostitution, as a "service" had early adopters. Agreed not every product or service has early adopters first. Scoble seems to making the case they EVERY product or service goes through an early adopter phase. As you rightly point out, that is not always the case.

Re: Early adopter angst

Danny — Fri, 02 May 2008 13:10:33 -0000

Robert, with all due respect, given your age there is no way in hell you remember the origin of the Frisbee craze, given that Wham-O released the toy in 1957. It was actually originally popular amongst college students. The point is, there was no "early adopter" period, per se. Wham-O did a great job of mass marketing.

As for cars, you are also off base. Car companies trot out concept cars at auto shows, and make sure the press and the trades cover it enough to measure interest. Then they decide to go to market and build the real thing, then, again, they do a mass market advertising campaign. But there is hardly a time where a small selection of people and "celebrities" are driving a mass produced car no one ever heard of. I guess the closest example would be GM's campaign of putting the new Camaro in Transformers. And yes, there is a small set of people that march into a dealership a put a deposit down on a car that has yet to be produced. I would not call them early adopters.

You completely lost me on you Wii counterpoint. Again, Nintendo did a mass marketing campaign about the Wii that generated enough pent up demand for almost everyone to want one. There as no "early adopter" phase where a small set of the population was using the product and tried to convince others it was a cool thing. If there was a small set, it was only due to lack of supply, not lack of knowledge of the product.

The early adopter concept applies more to technology than anything else. So, yes, Twitter is still being used by early adopters. And it may well continue to stay that way. And even if more normal people learn about Twitter, if they don;t see it solving a problem they don't already have a solution for (IM, text messaging, email), it won't catch on.

Re: Early adopter angst

aureliusmaximus — Fri, 02 May 2008 12:23:35 -0000

I'm not sure why there is so much hostility for the concept that they is a segment of the population that regularly "gets it" and begins using certain products and services before others.

The fact that their have been certain things that have instantly resonated with the public at large does not negate this fact or indiscriminately label non-early adopters as less-thans.

Of course electricity took off quickly - how hard was it for everyone to make the connection between lighting a candle with a match versus flipping a switch that would automatically supply a "candle" with an endless supply of power to light? Not hard at all.

The value of many new technologies however are not as easy for the average person to grasp. in fact if you watch the conversations that have been going on Twitter etc you begin to see that even the most "cutting edge" early adopters are grappling with the role these kinds of technologies could play in our lives.

That's the point. Early adopters, by nature, are bent towards seeking out and developing an understanding of the value of new products. In the process they vet a product's validity and tweak its focus and use. Products that find no really value or use in the early adopter community die on the vine and those that do find their place are slowly transferred to the population at large for use.

Again - some innovations provide benefits that are so obvious that everyone immediately understands their use and - providing they are financially able to do so - they adopt them. For everything else there are early adopters.

No morally good or bad - just fact.

Re: Early adopter angst

Christopher Coulter — Fri, 02 May 2008 08:30:10 -0000

Ahh, more of the usual elitist tripe. Value in marketing and early looks, no matter whom, but focusing on edge-case needs is the surest way to product ruination, as you create things that appeal to very small segments, taking the simple and functional to the death-inducing complex.

Entire industries SKIP early adopters wholesale and go product-marketing test base, heck, I live in Peoria, dead central for test marketing (I see this daily), they want the WIDEST demographic group possible, your Tweeting Geeks aren't that.

Twitter is a feature, IM gone broadcast, nothing more and much less, easily cloned. Stop wetting your pants over the latest shiny toy.

Re: Early adopter angst

Adi — Fri, 02 May 2008 04:36:03 -0000

Not a new concept. The concept of 'crossing the chasm' has been around for years and was certainly well discussed back in the boom and it was chucked out there again with Tipping Point style discussions.

Re: Early adopter angst

Robert Scoble — Fri, 02 May 2008 03:06:19 -0000

Danny: the car companies regularly make sure their cars are seen by early adopters/influentials/celebrities/passionates before they are seen by guys who are using old Windows 2000 computers.

I remember the Frisbee. It got popular because early adopters bought it and showed it around at parks and got late adopters to join in games.

Wii? OK, I didn't buy one, but guys who still use Windows 2000 didn't either. Who did? Kids who wanted a different kind of game. Dave Winer did too and still is showing his to me and trying to get me to buy one.

The rest? They are so old that who knows who the early adopters were and how they popularized the things.

Re: Early adopter angst

Danny — Fri, 02 May 2008 02:56:09 -0000

It's almost laughable how clueless about basic business concepts people in tech are. Early adopter is a basic marketing classification. Just go read "Crossing the Chasm", it explains everything Scoble is woefully trying to say in his post.

Couple of things, Scoble: Neither Domino, nor Exchange come with IM built in. They are sold as separate server products. Guess you never go around to interviewing the Exchange team when you were at MS, nor ever go around to talking to that other tech company, IBM, about their collaboration offerings.

"I can’t name a service that didn’t get popular with either early adopters or celebrities first, before going mainstream. Can anyone?"

Uhh... electricity?. Mass transit? Insurance? Medical care. Home delivery? Prostitution? Gambling, As for products:
The Ford Mustang. The Chevy Camaro. The Chrysler Mini-van. The iPhone. The Wii. the playstation. The Hula Hoop. The Frisbee.

As for Twitter, for Early and Late Majority, it's still a solution looking for a problem. A problem that segment already has a solution for: email, instant messaging, text messaging. The Early and Late Majority is not so insecure and narcissistic that it needs to "follow" hundreds of people and be informed and inform them of what they are doing or thinking. Until there is more value in Twitter than what they are currently using to stay in touch with their friends, it will still be the niche of the virtual SV crowd.

Re: Early adopter angst

Robert Scoble — Fri, 02 May 2008 01:21:28 -0000

Jake: I think there's a sizeable correllation between early adopterness (or, at minimum, what passionates and influentials think of said company) and P/E ratio.

I'm not talking about owning the stock. Although I'd certainly rather own Amazon's stock than Best Buy's.

Re: Early adopter angst

Jake Ludington — Fri, 02 May 2008 01:17:18 -0000

Robert you had me until you started talking P/E ratio. A higher P/E ratio does not necessarily mean you'd want to own a stock. A high P/E can be an indicator that a stock is grossly overvalued. A low P/E can mean that a stock is an excellent buy. There are many other factors that dictate whether or not making an investment in a particular stock is worthwhile.

More importantly, P/E has nothing to do with the overall early adopterness of a company.

Re: Early adopter angst

Georgia jenkins — Fri, 02 May 2008 00:43:49 -0000

Early adaptors is a relatively new concept to me -- coming from a study of the book "Remarkable Leadership" by group I'm in with 997Make Money Now.
They may be the drivers of change, but constitute only 13.5 %.
If people all follow them to all the tech "toys" as some put it, we really won't be able to handle all the waste that is being discarded. The author of "Waste Makers" years ago had no idea what this would all lead to.
I tend to agree with Casey in his statement "Early adopters do not drive society, they drive a segment of *consumption* within society. The consumption of technology-related products and services is primarily a sector of the economy which then arguably impacts cultural behavior, and ultimately society. Let’s not be so self-aggrandizing that we believe ourselves more relevant or influential than the public, or even of the agricultural sectors as each relates to “driving society”.

Re: Early adopter angst

Brady Brim-DeForest — Thu, 01 May 2008 23:41:06 -0000

Plus, early adopters are 'super sexy':
http://www.youtube.com/watc...

Re: Early adopter angst

Dawn Douglass — Thu, 01 May 2008 20:45:26 -0000

Web 2.0 won't go mainstream until more right-brained people are included in creating web-sites and applications, as I talk about often on my cartoon blog: http://inkswig.com/2008/05/...

Re: Early adopter angst

Richard Cunningham — Thu, 01 May 2008 20:40:05 -0000

I mostly think that people are late adopters by choice, they wait for 5-10 people to tell them how great something is before (potentially) wasting their time on it.

Non-early adopters think if something isn't well known or popular it can't be any good where as early adopters think the opposite - how many early adopters really like facebook for instance?.

Also anyone who does actually adopt anything early tends to get all the problems and longer you wait the more the problems have been sorted out - early adopters tend not to recommend things to non-early adopters until these problems have died down.

Re: Early adopter angst

Steve Wilhelm — Thu, 01 May 2008 19:34:17 -0000

"...more than 1.8 million users
have installed the Smilebox service since its launch in June 2006 and more
than 1.3 million unique users worldwide access it monthly."

http://www.prnewswire.com/c...

"..1.3 million total [Twitter] users three weeks ago...""

http://www.techcrunch.com/2...

Smilebox and Twitter have roughly the same number of active monthly users and started about the same time. But how many times have you read about Smilebox on this blog, Techmeme, etc.

I am sure there are other examples. Webkinz , games.aarp.org, etc.

Re: Early adopter angst

Robert Scoble — Thu, 01 May 2008 19:03:49 -0000

A higher P/E means that the market puts a higher value on what the company is doing than what they actually look like they are doing in revenues and expenses. It also means the market expects a lot more growth out of Amazon than out of Best Buy. Early adopters are driving both beliefs.

Re: Early adopter angst

Robert Scoble — Thu, 01 May 2008 19:03:02 -0000

College students are defacto early adopters. If they aren't trying to improve their lives or learn something new, why go to college? Most college students I know are way ahead of people who are older than 40. That environment enables new ideas/things to spread very fast.