Walter Hutchens’ Blog

I did a Google search for “second wave adopter,” the label I applied to myself yesterday. I found a pithy description of exactly what I was talking about in a document filed with the SEC by the company WebEX:

The adoption of web conferencing may follow a pattern similar to that which has been observed with other computer-related technologies. According to this pattern, the first users can be grouped into a category called early adopters, a relatively small percentage of potential users who first discover and are able to understand and make use of a new technology. If the product seems useful, a second wave of users may arise which is often many times larger than the number of early adopters. In the usual case, this larger number of users materializes because of workplace usefulness: employers start to understand the utility of the technology in the workplace and encourage or require employee usage of the technology. Eventually, if the utility of the technology is compelling enough, the technology may become a staple of most workplaces and the technology is deemed mainstream. Under this adoption pattern, the greatest growth in the market occurs during this migration from second wave to mainstream usage. One such example of this adoption pattern is usage of the desktop computer during the 1980s. Another example is usage of word processing software associated with the desktop computer during the 1990s. In each instance, time required to migrate from the early adoption phase to the mainstream phase exceeded ten years.