The Technology Adoption Lifecycle

When Google Talk came out a few years ago, I jumped right on it.  It had a clean user interface and easy-to-use voice chat.  I coerced a few close friends and family members to download it and give it a try… and it stuck.  Now, granted, that switch was fairly simple for us to make - A was better than B, AND we didn’t have to give up B to switch to A - we could all still use AIM to talk to our other friends, while using Google Talk to talk to each other.  Per the article above, we would be innovators - enthusiasts who liked technology for its own sake, and were willing to use something unknown.

As time progressed, our (more technologically inclined friends) saw what we were doing and were intrigued - especially by the minimal interface and the chat logging.  And, because they didn’t have to give up AIM to start using Google Talk, “switched” too.  This begins to address one aspect of “technology evangelism” - promoting technology to likely to switch, if only they knew about it.  These people simply needed to see Google Talk’s advantages and they were convinced.  But they didn’t really seek it out.  They would fit into the early adopter category - users who were willing to take a chance on a new technology because the posited that the benefits and risks were worth it.

Interestingly enough, there was even a chasm period, as described in the article.   The initial wave of early adopters had slowed to a trickle - but it was still a trickle.

Eventually, though, with the correct technology innovations (such as embedding Talk into Gmail, and starting to log chats into Gmail) on Google’s part, and a change in technology evangelism style on my part, a cascade began to form.  For one thing, I began to realize that more and more of my friends were using Google Talk - without my even mentioning it to them.  This was largely a function of them getting Gmail (at each other’s suggestion/encouragement) and beginning to use the built-in Talk function.  On the other hand, I began to realize how much I benefited from my friends using Google Talk (1. I could log my chats with them into Gmail and 2. they could greatly benefit from the improvement that Gmail is over Cornell Webmail, and Gmail includes Talk), so I began to very strongly encourage many of them to switch - and they did.  These would be the pragmatists (early adopters) - unwilling to adopt early because of risks, etc., but very willing to take advantage of the new technology and features.

Eventually, a small cluster of people within this larger cluster of Google Talk users that had been created (including myself) stopped using AIM completely.  The number of people we knew that only had AIM began dropping closer and closer to zero, to the point where it stopped being worth having.  This, in turn, created a new reason for the rest of our friends to switch to Google Talk - they had to if they wanted to talk to us.

This model is an interesting twist to the one discussed in class (with protocols A and B).  Perhaps represent those who use both A and B as a new protocol - C.  Switching directly from A to B is still really hard - following similar constraints to what was discussed in class.  Switching from either A or B to C is rather easy - a function of both quality and number of people who are either C or the opposite protocol.  Switch from C to A or B is rather hard - also a function of both quality (one has to be perceived as far better in order to give up the other) and number of people who are using the new target protocol (probably needs to be very high in order to be worthwhile).

And so you can stage a product incursion of A into the market of B as follows:

1. Start with all B nodes, rather completely and strongly interconnected
2. Convert some most-strongly-connected set of nodes to C - have initial C cluster
3. Adjacent nodes begin to convert to C  - C cluster grows, and a cascade starts
4. Eventually, some cluster of C nodes decides to switch completely to A - have initial A cluster
5. As C cluster grows, A cluster will grow, and conversely, as A cluster grows, C cluster will grow, and you have another cascade