This sponsored blog entry was submitted by Chris Gonsalves of ChannelNomics.
We’re all familiar with the trajectory technology innovations are supposed to take as they move toward mass adoption, that smooth bell curve that may or may not include Geoffrey Moore’s famous “chasm” in the early stages to technology adoption.
While the Innovation Adoption Lifecycle curve created by sociologist Everett Rogers in the early 1960s is seared in the minds of technology sellers to this day, one thing the model has always lacked is an element of realistic time and any sense of how technology adoption maybe be changing as new innovations hit the market with increasing speed and frequency.
Sure, we can plot where we think we are in the lifecycle of innovations important to the channel — cloud computing, mobility and virtualization, for example —but how quickly does a solution provider need to react to these disruptive forces in order to capitalize on the opportunity? And more importantly, how has that optimum reaction time changed since the early days of corporate computing and information technology?
Rogers’ bell curve often looks more like the trajectory of a bottle rocket as new technologies go from inception to mass market penetration in a wickedly short period. One masterful visualization of this adoption compression comes from Nicholas Felton of the New York Times.
Felton shows how common technologies like the telephone, household electricity and even the automobile took their sweet time over the past 100 and some years moving from innovation to early technology adoption and on through early and late majority and laggard users to reach near ubiquity in U.S. households.
Compare that to what technology resellers care most about today. In 1982, fewer than 10 percent of U.S. households had a computer. As recently as 1994, fewer than 10 percent had a cell phone or access to the Internet.
Another way to look at this comes from Michael DeGutsa from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s “MIT Technology Review,” which focuses on adoption of mobile devices compared to legacy technologies such as electricity, landline telephones, radio and television.
According to DeGusta, it took most of 100 years for landlines to achieve market saturation. Cell phones, on the other hand, reached that point of diminishing demand in just 20 years. Smart phones are on track to cut that time to 10 years and tablet devices could prove even faster than that when the dust settles.
Clearly, technology adoption records are being set for speed to market saturation as innovative technologies hit the market. Part of the trend comes from the reduced reliance of newer innovations on so-called last-mile support like the laying of electrical and telephone cables across the nation.
While similar comparisons of enterprise technologies are difficult to come by, it’s not stretch to assume that the same forces are at work churning the world of B2B technology purveyors. The same reduction in last-mile problems exists in the enterprise, where technologies like cloud computing and mobility are enjoying historically low barriers to entry.
What’s a smart partner to do with this knowledge? The onus is on solution providers to recognize the almost impossibly short early adoption period afforded most innovative technologies today and react accordingly. Where once a reseller could wait years to capitalize on a market disruption and still profit, that period of opportunity now takes mere months.
All of the partners still debating their organization’s appropriate position in the cloud or mobility services or software-defined networking or Big Data analytics or the Internet of things need to view the modern technology market as a race to secure a spot early in the adoption cycle and then hang on for a wild ride.
