The Chasm
The gap between early adopters and the pragmatic mainstream in high-tech adoption
The chasm is Geoffrey Moore’s name for a break in the technology adoption lifecycle: the hard transition from early market (visionaries, early adopters buying change) to mainstream market (pragmatists buying productivity and references). Many products die in the gap — not because the idea is wrong, but because the offer and go-to-market that worked for pioneers fail for pragmatists.
Moore builds on Everett Rogers’s diffusion of innovation and the familiar Innovation S-curve but argues adoption in high-tech is not smoothly sigmoid: there is a discontinuity — the chasm — requiring a different strategy (whole product, beachhead segment, references, channels).
Chasm vs Innovation Divide
The Genesis vignette uses words like innovator and pragmatist that echo Moore and Rogers, but Innovation Divide is intentionally not Moore’s chasm. It is the failure mode where tier is invisible, so the innovator’s enthusiasm and the laggard’s dismissal look like factual disagreement.
Corpus stance
A2 — working context: Not epistemic canon. Judgment infrastructure aims to improve decisions; the chasm names one of the hard adoption problems that infrastructure should help teams cross more frequently. Use Moore as a lens for judging situations (lifecycle position, stalled mainstream uptake) and as input to strategy layered above honest tier and commitment — not as a go-to-market frame for capture modes or event sourcing in themselves. A team can exhibit both a market chasm and an Innovation Divide (misassigned tier on shared evidence); both can be true and need different remedies.