It sure would have been nice to be able to accurately predict which of these things would become mainstream and which would not. Here are some important ideas, briefly summarized, that may have helped do this:

• Geoffrey Moore in his classic book, Crossing the Chasm (Moore, 1991, p. 3), indicates that new technologies achieve adoption by mainstream users and markets where there is the highest “compelling reason to buy.” This phrase basically means that the value is so clear and the positioning against other alternatives is so favorable that it is a slam-dunk.
• Peter Drucker in his book, Managing in the Next Society (Drucker, 2002, pp. 10-11), points out that in technological revolutions most of the changes are changes in how we do things, not what we do. His examples are the industrial revolution and the information revolution. Most of the adopted changes from both, with a few notable exceptions, have improved the productivity of things we already knew how to do. An example is that we use the Internet as a better way to buy books, but we don’t use it (for the most part), to read digital books.
• Clayton Christensen in his book, Seeing What’s Next (Christensen et al., 2004), provides theories for understanding when truly disruptive innovations (as opposed to sustaining innovations) take hold, pointing to the important opportunity provided by “nonconsumers.” Nonconsumers are those that are the non-users of a product or product category. They are generally not using because the product is too complex or not offered in the right context. This book uses these theories to explain the rise of for-profit and other educational alternatives (Christensen et al., 2004, pp. 99-128).

While hindsight is always 20/20, it appears that the application of these three “forecasters” eight years ago would have produced pretty accurate results. The forecasting screen would specify that the most successful technologies will be ones in which all three conditions hold:

1. There is an extremely compelling reason to adopt, meaning it’s almost hard to imagine life without it.
2. It enhances how the user does something they already do, but does not radically change what they do.
3. It is particularly appealing to the nonusers – providing them an appealing approach to accomplish something they feel they probably need to do yet haven’t had an easy enough way to get it done.