Crossing the chasm with payments (part 1)
What can payments companies learn from tech successes and failures?
Disclaimer: views expressed here are my own and do not represent any other organisation
Some companies and some technologies never make it big. Especially, but not exclusively in B2B, products often fail because they struggle to cross the chasm.
Crossing the chasm is hard.
Companies find it tough to go from having a product or service with a small number of early adopters to one embraced by the majority of buyers in a market.
You’ve likely seen or heard this concept before. It’s an idea most relevant to discontinuous innovation. In other words, big epoch-defining changes in technology.
Some examples of discontinuous innovation include:
Dumbphone → Smartphone
Physical mail → Email
Cable TV → Streaming
In all cases, successful examples of discontinuous innovation involve disruption, creating new value for users, and the potential to leapfrog competitors.
Successful discontinuous innovation often creates a brand new category, fulfilling customers’ immediate needs but also unlocking possibilities they hadn’t yet imagined.
How not to cross the chasm
Remember the reaction of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer when the iPhone was first introduced? He laughed, thinking that no one would ever buy a $500 phone. However, events unfolded in a way that Ballmer likely did not expect.
In September 2013, Microsoft announced that it would acquire Nokia for $7.2 billion. This move had been on the cards for a while. Steven Elop had joined Nokia from Microsoft in 2010 as their new CEO and, in 2011, made the fateful decision to stop using Nokia’s proprietary Symbian platform.
Rather than adopting the fast-growing Android platform, Nokia opted for the Windows Phone operating system as its Symbian replacement. At the same time, Nokia and Microsoft entered a strategic partnership. This partnership arrangement lasted a few years until Microsoft’s acquisition of Nokia was completed in April 2014. Yet in July 2015, just over a year later, Microsoft announced a $7.6 billion write-off of its Nokia acquisition.
By the end of the decade Microsoft had left the mobile phone business entirely.
When writing this, I had a flashback to Autumn 2013. I was working for a company that gave me a Windows Phone for corporate use. It was truly dreadful to use, and it seems like others felt the same. Windows Phone as an operating system never garnered more than 3.2% of the smartphone market share. The limited success was mainly due to sales to corporate clients.
Meanwhile, since 2014, Apple has made more than $1.65 trillion worth of iPhone sales. The iPhone successfully crossed the chasm. Visionaries loved it, and pragmatists soon followed. The price was not the issue that Steve Ballmer expected; the iPhone sold out at launch, as it did at subsequent launches.
The iPhone’s success started with the consumer market, and a large share of the consumers who opted to buy the iPhone were already familiar with the iPod. Apple’s Press Release at the time of the announcement of the iPhone even played on its similarity with the iPod, declaring it to be “a widescreen iPod”, albeit one with email, Google Maps, a full web browser, and other appealing functionality.
Over the years, Apple gradually added functionality prized by large enterprises, enabling it to win market share on the business side as well as on the consumer side.
The origin of an idea
The concept of crossing the chasm was first coined by Geoffrey Moore in the early 1990s and has been a useful reference point ever since. It looks at why products or services succeed in a way that goes beyond simplistic technical or cost reasons, as having more features or being cheaper are not themselves guarantees of success.