Blu-ray moves to an early majority? A what? #tech #marketing

I know what an early adopter phase is, but what's an 'early majority' phase? Are they just making stuff up? Well, yes, of course they are - we all make stuff up. Being human we like to categorise and label - it's how we learn and cope with our environment. Aside from labelling poisons and food stuffs for purely practical purposes, we have invented 'baby boomer' as a broad demographic label for a real surge in births and then felt compelled to continue labelling each succeeding 'generation' whether it makes sense, or correlates with real research, or not. Mostly not.

So it is with marketing speak and the phases of a product life cycle. We are getting carried away with granularity whilst mixing in some hype and spin. Yes, Blu-ray has won the HD war, yes sales are growing and prices are falling. If it becomes compelling enough we'll all buy one. Unless something disruptive comes along first, like massive, cheap broadband and Internet-enabled home A/V gear. Who needs a disc in a data-on-demand world?

In any case 'Early majority' doesn't really make any sense - either you have a majority or you don't (and Blu-ray technology has less than 10% share no matter how you look at it, so 'majority' is a hard label to pin on it). So it's a majority of what? Nothing?