In Crossing the Chasm Geoffrey Moore explains that as new technology is being sold different groups of people will buy the technology for different reasons. The early adopters will respond to one set of messages, while later groups have different issues. The early adopters tend to be a small segment of the market, like around five to ten percent. The bread and butter is in hitting the main stream. Companies make a lot more money selling to 70% of the market than 10%, but they need to change their marketing strategy. Crossing the Chasm is an enlightening book.
I've been working in the high tech industry for a couple decades. I enjoy being a software engineer. It is fun to create. Given my career I am a bit quirky in that I am not an early adopter. For example while my wife has had a cell phone for years and years, I only recently picked up one.
As cell phones pick up more functionality they become more and more like computers, with many of the same problems computers have. SlashDot reports that Spit Will Be Worse Than Spam:
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A team of German computer scientists has developed a program that reproduces all the known forms of spit (spam over internet telephony) attack. Their plan is to make the spitting software available to computer security experts wanting to test antispit strategies. Developing these won't be easy. There are various antispit techniques, such as white lists that allow only calls from predetermined callers, Turing tests such as audio CAPTCHAs that make a caller prove he or she is human and payment-at-risk services where the caller makes a small payment in advance and is refunded immediately if the receiver acknowledges the call as legitimate. But all have weaknesses, say the researchers. The main difference between junk calls and junk email is that the email arrives at your mail server before you access it. This gives the server time to analyze its content and filter out the junk before it gets to you. Not so with internet telephony, which is why radically different strategies are needed.
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It is developments like this that keep most of us back from being early adopters.
Have you had a SPIT attack on your cell phone?
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Technorati tags: cell phone, spit
4 comments:
Yes, as a matter of fact, I have! Just the other day, my one year old, gadget-grabbing, toy-sucking tot grabbed my cellphone and used it as a teether - just before an important phone came in.
Now that's a SPIT attack! :)
(I enjoyed your post, thanks for the tech update!)
Interesting that you are also not an early adopter. My husband is an electrical engineer but his laptop is a couple of years old, his computer, though updated, is even older. He doesn't bank over the internet or download songs.
For a cell phone, he has a Blackberry-type device, a couple of years old, of course, that he calls his brain. And he is truly lost without it.
Neither of us has gotten a spam phone call on our cell phones, but both of us have gotten spam text messages. And that's even more galling since we have to pay for those!
We disabled text messaging for exactly this reason. But I am wondering, what is the difference between a "spit" call and and automated-junk phone call like you get on any phone? We still get plenty of those, even after being on the do-not-call list, since "non-profits" don't have to abide by it.
Heather - you are right, that is a SPIT attack.
Karen - I think that sometimes those of us who deal heavily in technology are more hesitant to use the latest cool gadget. For example, I would be very slow to trust a car driven by a computer.
Denise - as I understand it SPIT, spam over internet telephony, is different because it originates from the internet, vs. automated-junk phone calls which I don't think always come from the internet.
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