The Loneliness of the Early Adopter

I’m an Early Adopter. I like to be among the first to try out new products and services. If you were looking for me on the Rogers Technology Adoption Lifecycle–the bell-shaped curve that’s a favorite of product managers–you’d find me on left side of the curve, just after the truly courageous Innovators but before the onset of the rabble of the Early Majority.

Being an early adopter means that sometimes I’ve been left in the lurch when a product or service I adopted early failed or was pulled inexplicably from the market. Were you also a user of Pownce, Yahoo Photos, or Google Notebook? Everything has a natural lifecycle, of course, and I have to expect that some of the products I (perhaps too eagerly) embraced will not survive.

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