New tech products are usually expensive, semi-useless, and buggy. When describing the feeling of first-generation tech, a certain phrase comes to mind. No, it isn’t “buyers remorse,” it’s “early adopter pain.”
Early adopter pain is difficult to describe, but it’s necessary for technological and social progress. It’s like the pain that comes after a long run mixed with the rush of gambling. And like gambling, early adopter pain is expensive.
But what makes someone an early adopter, and how is early adopter pain necessary for progress?
The Five Stages of Technology Adoption
A simple Google search for “early adopters” shows that, as a concept, early adopters are very important to businesses. In fact, they’re practically the deciding factor for a product’s success. According to Everett Rogers, professor of communication studies at the University of New Mexico, there are five stages to technology adoption that form a marketing bell curve. In his book Diffusions of Innovations, Rogers describes how early adopters are practically the first and most crucial stage of a product’s life-cycle, even though early adopters make up a very small market share.
According to Rogers’ 5 stages to technology adoption, innovators are the absolute first investors in a new product, even though they make up the smallest market share. These innovators tend to have a lot of financial resources, so they can drop a lot of money on new products, even if they’re half-baked or doomed to fail. But innovators don’t have a lot of influence on the public; they’re just the rich people that invest in new ideas at the drop of a hat.
Early adopters are the second phase of Rogers’ adoption curve, and they’re the people in whom we’re most interested. According to Rogers, early adopters tend to be young, trendy, and well-to-do. Early adopters (in the field of tech) are usually journalists or YouTubers that have a lot of influence over average consumers, and they’re often the first place where consumers find new information.
As you can imagine, early adopters need to be critical of new products to maintain credibility. If your favorite nerdy YouTuber started waving around some stupid new product and claimed that it’s the future of technology, you’d hopefully hold less trust in their opinions. As a result, manufacturers tend to cater to early adopters by making new products look luxurious, vocalizing the product’s potential, or by adapting to early adopter opinions at the beginning of a product’s life-cycle.
Once a product reaches Early Majority or Late Majority, it’s considered successful. These categories indicate that average consumers have started to adopt the product and that it’s probably permeated through most of society. When a product starts to reach early or late majority adoption, manufacturers start to market it as “easy to use” or “universal.” Desktop computers are a good example of this. Once average people started buying desktops, businesses started developing tools like the computer mouse and clean GUI’s to make things more appealing.
Laggards are the last people to adopt a product, and they represent a small market share. People that are out of date or elderly usually fall in this category, and businesses (smartphone manufacturers, for example) usually aim products toward laggards as an afterthought.
We’ve All Experienced Early Adopter Pain
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Source : Early Adopter Pain Is Real, But We Need It For Progress
