Comments on: Achieving adoption of a disruptive product

By: What’s wrong with a little learning curve?

What’s wrong with a little learning curve? — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 07:52:51 +0000

[...] When the telephone was invented, Bell Co. tried to sell the patent to the British Post Office but they weren’t interested. The Chief Engineer famously responded “…we have plenty of messenger boys”. Bell then realised, like Apple did 100 years later, that people had to experience real usage of their product in order to “get it”. So Bell developed an aggressive adoption strategy to get telephones into peoples’ hands. They put phones in hotel rooms for calling the front desk, in offices as a replacement to intercoms, and near lunch counters in diners – a brilliant idea that not only got people to use them but also ensured people saw others using them in real life. It’s interesting to consider that today, Apple’s TV ads draw upon the same underlying strategy – the ads are presented like actual product demos. The viewer gets to vicariously experience real usage. The same goes for the hands-on nature of Apple Retail Stores, where anyone can walk in and play with any of the hardware for as long as they want. It’s not an act of kindness, it’s an adoption strategy. [...]

By: Top posts of 2009 on 90percentofeverything.com- 90 Percent of Everything

Top posts of 2009 on 90percentofeverything.com- 90 Percent of Everything — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 09:11:06 +0000

[...] Achieving adoption of a disruptive product [...]

By: Sjors

Sjors — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 21:36:16 +0000

You could even state that revolutionary disruptive technologies must be met with sceptic, if not, they are not revolutionary

By: Nick

Nick — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 12:27:36 +0000

I like your last point – designing the product is only half the battle, you need an adoption plan too.

Telephones, voicemail, fax, SMS and (I think) Google Wave are all platform products. Their point is to enable other people to do other things using the platform, and, nobody is smart enough to predict all the things other people will do (or be willing to pay for) on a platform once it’s out there.

Of course, this makes planning for adoption a lot higher risk.

But, if you win with a platform, you tend to win BIG.

By: Rob Gillham

Rob Gillham — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 10:28:38 +0000

Thanks for a stimulating post Harry. Interesting quote from the Post Office. Reminds me of the argument that the Ancient Romans could have had the Industrial Revolution 2,000 years early if they hadn’t been so wedded to a slave economy.

On the flipside, is the danger here that we have the old arrogant technologist’s fallacy that ‘people will want it when we explain to them what it does’? The great masses are disruptive in their usage of technology, as much as the technology itself disrupts. British Telecom for example conceived SMS as a business tool, yet it was adopted by kids who owned phones but couldn’t afford extortionate call charges.

I wonder how much of the telephone’s common uses were actually predicted by Bell?

By: Simon Johnson

Simon Johnson — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 09:57:24 +0000

A great slide deck for how to approach adaptation can be seen at http://www.slideshare.net/bokardo/designing-for-social-traction

By: Aaron Cheang

Aaron Cheang — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 09:11:25 +0000

Nice post. Glad our discussions stimulate your blogs!
Let’s see if Google Wave can be a disruptive technology or not

By: Alison

Alison — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 07:52:52 +0000

Nice post. Poor old British Post Office, although they did eventually catch on to the significance of the telephone. Sadly they seem to have been completely wrong-footed by the internet.