Early Adopters, you're saying it wrong!

There are five stages of product adoption: Innovators, Early Adopters, Early Majority, Late Majority, Laggards.

Use Television as an example. In the late 1920s to around the mid 1930s, you could buy a very expensive experimental TV. These would be the "Innovators" as there was no real market for them and people could actually tinker with the sets and improve them. Every brand TV had their own frequency, so no two could watch the same programs. Some had round screens, others had square screens. Some were black and white, others were in color. Yes there were actually color TVs in the 30s! A standard was finally settled on, and the FCC recommended all focus be on black and white TVs. Black and white was cheaper to make and also faster to produce and the government needed a large amount of them soon because the troops were coming back from the war and needed something to entertain them.

The "Early Adopters" would then be all the people that bought those first black and white TVs in the 1940s, making the 1950s and 1960s the "Early Majority" and "Late Majority" with the rest being the "Laggards." That is, until HDTVs were introduced. A technology much different than the TVs people were used to, thus started the cycle all over again with people buying the first HDTV units being the "Early Adopters" (the "Innovators" in this case would be the people that built the technology).

The problem is that people don't seem to know what an "Early Adopter" really is, as they throw the term around to mean buying ANY product within the first month it comes out. I see people on websites call themselves Early Adopters for preordering the iPhone 5. Let me make this clear to you, you are not an early adopter. The iPhone has been around for six years now. With technology moving as fast as it does, and with the widespread adoption of smartphones, the term Late Majority might not even fit, I dare to say you might be a Laggard. (although really a "Laggard" is when when you finally buy something right before it becomes obsolete for the next thing, like buying a VCR when DVD Players hit the market). In either case, you are NOT an Early Adopter.

Just because a product is an upgrade from a preexisting product doesn't mean you're an Early Adopter because you bought one within the first 24 hours. That is not how it works! I was an Early Adopter when I bought a Google TV on the day they were first released, back when Sony was charging around $400 for their Blu-ray Disc Player with integrated Google TV software. It was $100 more than the Logitech Revue, but I figured even if Google TV turned out to be horrible (and it was, still is) at least I'd be able to watch Blu-ray movies. Now fast forward to today when you can pick up a Google TV box for around $99 with better hardware from Sony and Vizio. People that never had one before, that buy one now, you can no longer be considered an Early Adopter. You're an Early Majority since more people I know have them in their homes than before (when I got mine, there was only a small handful of people that owned them). When they became cheaper, more people bought.

So please, before you call yourself an Early Adopter for buying an iPhone, stop and think for a moment if you are really using the term correct.