In this, the second of Geoff Moore's classic three-part marketing series, Moore provides highly useful guidelines for moving products beyond early adopters and into the lucrative mainstream market. Updated for the HarperBusiness Essentials series with a new author's note. Once a product "crosses the chasm" it is faced with the "tornado," a make or break time period where mainstream customers determine whether the product takes off or falls flat. In Inside the Tornado , Moore details various marketing strategies that will teach marketers how reach these customers and how to take advantage of living inside the tornado in order to reap the benefits of mainstream adoption. In this, the second of Geoff Moore's classic three-part marketing series, Moore provides highly useful guidelines for moving products beyond early adopters and into the lucrative mainstream market. Updated for the HarperBusiness Essentials series with a new author's note. Once a product "crosses the chasm" it is faced with the "tornado," a make or break time period where mainstream customers determine whether the product takes off or falls flat. In Inside the Tornado , Moore details various marketing strategies that will teach marketers how reach these customers and how to take advantage of living inside the tornado in order to reap the benefits of mainstream adoption. Geoffrey A. Moore is the author of Escape Velocity , Inside the Tornado , and Living on the Fault Line . Inside the Tornado Strategies for Developing, Leveraging, and Surviving Hypergrowth Markets By Moore, Geoffrey A. HarperBusiness ISBN: 0060745819 The Development of Hypergrowth Markets Chapter One The Land of Oz At the beginning of The Wizard of Oz , Dorothy and Toto are caught up inside a tornado, swept away from their mundane world of Kansas, and deposited into the marvelous land of Oz. This miraculous form of ascension is also reenacted from time to time on our own public stock exchanges. Consider the following: Compaq Computers , which in recent years has overtaken IBM as the leader of the Intel-based PC market, grew from zero to $1 billion in less than five years. - Ditto for Conner Peripherals , the disk-drive storage company who slipstreamed Compaq's hypergrowth by supplying it, as well as many of its competitors, with low-cost Winchester hard drives. - Over a six-year period from 1977 to 1982, Atari 's home game business doubled in size every year, driving the company from $50 million to $1.6 billion in revenues. - In successive years during the mid-1980s, Mentor Graphics grew from $2 million to $25 million to $85 million to $135 million to $200 million. - For the entire decade of the 1980s, Oracle Corporation grew at an annually compounded rate of 100 percent. * More recently, Cisco Systems and Bay Networks have appeared out of nowhere to become billion-dollar companies--leaders, respectively, in the network router and the network hub markets. We didn't even know what routers and hubs were until just a few years ago. - In the seven years prior to 1992, Sony shipped their first ten million CD-ROM players. The next ten million were shipped over the following seven months, and the ten million after that in the following five months. - Hewlett-Packard 's PC printer business, a $10 billion enterprise in 1994, shipped its first product a scant ten years earlier. - And finally, Microsoft in less than fifteen years has grown from a boutique language software company focused on BASIC to the richest and most powerful software company in the world. Such are the market forces generated by discontinuous innovations, or what more recently have been termed paradigm shifts. These shifts begin with the appearance of a new category of product that incorporates breakthrough technology enabling unprecedented benefits. It is immediately proposed as the natural replacement for a whole class of infrastructure, winning early converts and enthusiastic predictions of a new world order. But the market is a conservative institution, and it presses back against the new changes, preferring to stay with the status quo. For a long time, although much is written about the new paradigm, little of economic significance happens. Indeed, sometimes the innovation is never embraced, falling back into some primordial entrepreneurial soup, as did artificial intelligence in the 1980s and pen-based computing in the early 1990s. But in many other cases there comes a flash point of change when the entire marketplace, under the pressure of continually escalating disequilibrium in price/performance, shifts its allegiance from the old architecture to the new. This sequence of events unleashes a vortex of market demand. Infrastructure, to be useful, must be standard and global, so once the market moves to switch out the old for the new, it wants to complete this transition as rapidly as possible. All the pent-up interest in the product is thus conv