Geoffrey Moore

Moore was a consultant at Regis McKenna — the firm behind Apple's early marketing — when he noticed the same stall pattern across client after client: strong visionary sales, then nothing. Crossing the Chasm turned Everett Rogers' academic diffusion curve into an operating manual for tech companies, and thirty years of B2B go-to-market playbooks are footnotes to it.

Moore took Everett Rogers' academic diffusion curve, found the crack running down its middle, and wrote the go-to-market manual that three decades of technology companies have executed — knowingly or not. Crossing the Chasm named the discontinuity between visionary and pragmatist buyers; the sequels (Inside the Tornado, Zone to Win) followed companies through the hypergrowth and portfolio decisions that come after. His core instinct — that markets are social systems where references, not features, move the majority — is why 'beachhead' and 'whole product' are permanent fixtures of B2B vocabulary.