In praise of the early adopters
David Crookes looks at why the IT industry needs early adopters like you – and why tech that fell by the wayside should still be celebrated
David Crookes looks at why the IT industry needs early adopters like you – and why the technology that fell by the wayside should still be celebrated.
We’ve all encountered laggards. “One of those fancy new smartphones, is it?,” they will have said a decade ago, nodding towards the black slab you just pulled out of your pocket. “My old Nokia 3210 does everything I need. Fancy a game of Snake?”
In truth, there’s nothing inherently wrong with this attitude. They swore by their device’s long battery life and robust nature, just as you swore when your phone fell to the floor with a sickening thud.
The term “laggards” for people who prefer to stand still was coined back in 1962, when Professor Everett Rogers published Diffusion of
Innovations. He didn’t intend the word in a rude way, but no company in its right mind will ever target them.
I thought of the laggards when I heard, in mid-July, that Valve had announced a new portable handheld console designed to play PC games.
Built on Linux and resembling a Nintendo Switch in many respects, the Steam Deck will prise countless PC gamers away from their computers and into the fresh air. Contrary to reputation, they seem keen to emerge from their darkened rooms: the Steam Deck sold out in minutes.
It’s the kind of device that has been catching the attention of tech fans for decades. Those buying it, however, are on the other side of the spectrum to the laggards. They’re the innovators and early adopters – folk, I suspect, who are just like you – and, as drivers of the tech industry, they are very important indeed.
Taking a risk
Imagine, if you will, that hundreds of thousands of people didn’t lay 99 notes on Windows 1.0 in 1985; that instead they’d listened to the critics who, two years after first catching wind of the operating system, had begun writing it off as “vapourware”.
Or imagine that 200 people didn’t snap up an Apple I assembled circuit board at a cost of $666.66 shortly after it went on sale in July 1976. Where would Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak have gone next? Would they have progressed to the Apple II the following year or would the hobbyists and computer enthusiasts who snapped up their second machine have been forced to look elsewhere? It was those early adopters who kept Apple ticking along until VisiCalc launched in mid-1979 and helped the computer leap into the professional market – to the next group along, the so-called “early majority”. Similarly, it was early adopters who snapped up Motorola’s cellphones in the US in 1983 even though some considered them to be rich people’s toys.
There’s little doubt that we owe a debt of gratitude to these digital drivers, particularly so given the vast sums of cash they end up splashing out. The first console to use ROM cartridges and a microprocessor, the Fairchild Channel F, cost $170 on its debut, which is the equivalent of $772 today. The first commercially successful portable computer, the Osborne 1, cost $1,795 in 1981 – that’s $5,000 adjusted for inflation.
Sometimes it pays off; often it doesn’t. But the point is that there are people willing to take a punt. More than 50,000 people bought the first Macintosh within eight weeks of its going on sale in February 1984, perhaps taken by the lavish $1.5 million television advert directed by
Ridley Scott and aired during the third quarter of Super Bowl XVIII.
Just five months later, however, the initial 128K version was overshadowed by a more expensive 512K version. Then the Macintosh Plus was released in January 1986 with double the memory and a price tag some $700 cheaper than the Mac 512K. Bad luck on the part of the early adopters, perhaps, and something that would stick in the throat. But despite having repeated the measure, a good number of Apple fans still like to get in first, hence the queues seen in recent years.
Indeed, on 15 August 1998, Apple released the iMac G3. It had its first revision on 4 September, upping the amount of video RAM from 2MB to 6MB. There were further tweaks on 5 January and 15 April the following year, introducing new colours and, crucially, faster processors. On 5 October 1999, the tray-loading iMac was discontinued and the lineup was then enhanced further.
But that’s the thing. People become early adopters for the prestige of getting in early and the cost of that is not only a big dent to their wallet but the chance that a new version is just around the corner. What companies have to show is that the gamble was worth it; that the product can quickly assimilate into their buyers’ lives. Getting punters to part with their cash as soon as possible only gets companies so far.
Spreading the word
There can be a backlash from time to time. Apple caused an outcry when it reduced the price of the original iPhone by $200 two months after it went on sale, prompting Steve Jobs to issue a $100 credit. Amazon upset early adopters when it released the Kindle 2 in 2009, didn’t mention the Kindle DX was coming, then lopped a good chunk off the former’s price.
T h e N i n t e n d o 3 D S a l s o h a d a tt hh ii r dd o ff its price cut less than five months after launch, dropping the RRP from £270 to £170, although that was to kickstart sluggish sales.
In general, though, early adopters tend to be young and curious, unsaddled by practical concerns such as mortgages, families and the like, so they can take the financial hit so long as they can enjoy being the first kid on the block to have something.
Even so, there’s a lot of careful thinking going on. Take that Steam Deck: some will be lured by the new and shiny but, more likely, those purchasers will have spotted the opportunity to take their PC games on the road and make use of the titles piled up in their Steam library. That’s what Valve will be hoping for.
“Early adopters of a technology are often evangelists and influencers for later adopters,” JP Eggers, associate professor of management at New
York University, told PC Pro. “They’re more valuable than a comparable number of later adopters.”
Academic researchers James C Brancheau and James C Wetherbe have long agreed. In their 1990 paper,
The Adoption of Spreadsheet Software, they not only said early adopters were highly educated but that they were “more attuned to mass media, more involved in interpersonal communication and more likely to be opinion leaders”.
WW ii tt hho u tt tt hh e m , tt hh e tt e chh ll a n dd s c a p e would be very different.
Why? Good early adopters will invest in a product to the extent that they will play around, tweak settings and push their new devices to the limits – and they are worth their weight in gold. They will give early feedback, prompt improvements to be made and help products cross over into the mainstream.
“As customers, early adopters
are vital, otherwise many products simply wouldn’t get to version
2.0,” said Amstrad’s former group technology consultant Roland Perry. “As designers, I’m a strong believer that the best way to create a product with a hope of a future is to employ early adopters, with experience in similar technologies, on the team.”
Perry is well aware of what happens to products that don’t benefit from early adopter investment. In 1990, Amstrad launched the new
8-bit Amstrad 464 and 6128 Plus computers, an enhancement of the existing CPC range – a version 2.0, if you like. Unfortunately, the firm underestimated the potential customers for these machines, with boss Alan Sugar saying: “The end user doesn’t know whether it’s 16-bit, 8-bit, or if it’s working with gas or steam or with elastic bands.”
“Early adopters are usually risk tolerant so it can be possible to target that group really well and succeed but then struggle”
As it turns out, the end user did know and these machines fared badly against the 16-bit Commodore Amiga and Atari ST. As if to underline how wrong Lord Sugar proved to be, the accompanying Amstrad GX4000 console also fared poorly against Nintendo and Sega.
There were simply too few early adopters and too little excited chatter from anyone who did buy. Instead there were moans that there were far too few games and disquiet that the enhanced colour palette was not immediately accessible. It took a while for developers and users to see how good the machines were, but it was too little, too late. “There’s was nothing ‘early adopter-ish’ about it,” said Perry, who also worked on the hugely successful PCW range. “If anything it was at the other end of the spectrum.”
Kickstarting new tech
It’s fair to say, then, that a lack of early adoption is one reason why tech history is littered with flops, albeit not the only one. A decent number of people backed HD-DVD but the decision to let PlayStation 3 consoles play Blu-ray discs meant those early adopters were left with a stack of obsolete discs and players. Even those who backed Blu-ray initially were left wanting: most early players couldn’t upgrade and benefit from new features such as picture-in-picture.
There are also cases of tech failing to catch on despite being snapped up in the initial weeks – or even before it’s been made. The game console Ouya is a prime example: a device financed by 63,416 backers to the tune of £8.6 million on Kickstarter in 2013 yet discontinued two years later.
In this case, the problem was partly due to the console being technically flawed, but there was also a lack of emotional investment. Developers didn’t create killer titles and early adopters appeared unwilling to pay for games. Those who bought it loved the idea that they could have a console capable of playing indie games but, in reality, it fell rather short.
“Kickstarter is a bit odd because people make adoption decisions without knowing what the product is,” explained Professor Eggers. “So there often are products that sound really cool but then when people get them they actually suck. Kickstarter is also rife with the fear of missing out so adoption decisions aren’t always very rational.”
This makes attracting the “early majority” even harder.
“Early adopters are really different from later adopters in terms of demographics and their preferences,” said Eggers. “This is why we get phenomena like the challenge of
‘crossing the chasm’ where early successful firms struggle to gain traction with the mainstream market.
“Early adopters are usually risk tolerant so it can be possible to target that group really well and succeed but then struggle later,” he added.
Pointing the way
Yet failure doesn’t have to be a dirty word. While it’s desirable to cross the chasm into the mainstream and make a huge impact, there are still benefits for manufacturers having had a bash if things don’t work out. You only need look at Apple’s Newton MessagePad – a product that was, with hindsight, years ahead of its time – as proof of that.
Launched in 1993, it sold 50,000 units to early adopters and became one of the firm’s fastest-selling products. Unfortunately, despite promising to make computing truly portable and thereby proving very attractive, its handwriting recognition feature was woeful – making it the butt of jokes to such an extent that it was even lampooned in an episode of The Simpsons.
Apple stuck with it through various iterations before giving up in 1998. But, 12 years later, Apple resurrected the idea with the iPad, having benefited from the experience and with feedback from early adopters still ringing in its ears. The company knew people wanted a portable device, they just needed to perfect it.
There are other examples where early adopters have found a taste for new technology and prompted manufacturers to either persevere or become attuned to the potential. The 68,929 backers who stumped up a total of £10.2 million for the Pebble smartwatch on Kickstarter in 2012 will have shown the likes of Apple and Samsung there was an appetite for wearables particularly given how engaged developers were in creating apps and watch faces.
Similarly when Sega launched the Dreamcast in 1998, early adopters bought more than 200,000 units in 24 hours and 500,000 within two weeks. Sales may have proven slower thereafter (eventually hitting just ten million compared to 158 million of the PlayStation 2) but the inclusion of a modem ushered the dawn of online console games. Within a month of launching SegaNet, 1.55 million Dreamcasts were registered online. Such popularity didn’t go unnoticed.
Of course, being an early adopter isn’t always straightforward. Systems may prove unstable, teething problems emerge, and the act of buying tech within days or weeks of its introduction can feel like a voyage of discovery, particularly if features are poorly documented.
You may find a new device isn’t compatible with the old, forcing you into more tech upgrades (particularly true when new ports are introduced, from HDMI to USB-C). You’ll also inevitably end up buying at the highest price given technology tends to become cheaper not more expensive as times goes on.
But that’s part of the excitement of being ahead of the curve. It’s what allows innovation to continue, monopolies to be broken and tech to move on. That Nokia 3210 was once exciting; lots of retro tech continues to be. Yet just as early adopters have made a big impact in the past, they’ll continue to do so for many years to come, and as we eye the past, we’ll always keep a watch on the future.