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?

Guitar gadgets: Line 6 'Backtrack'

An inline memory device that records your guitar playing as you go, with the ability to mark the bits (and I do mean bits) you want to keep and dump to your PC. There's a microphone option, too. Always on, BackTrack begins recording as soon as it detects a signal. Just plug into the quiet 1/4-inch input and start playing. And use the 1/4-inch output for immediate playback. Just set it and forget it for total inspiration control. Pressing the “Mark” button designates what you just played as special and separates it for easy review. The Forward and Reverse buttons provide instant recall of marked and non-marked ideas. It has a Gig of on-board flash RAM.

Alternatively you could also just run your guitar through your PC (using iAxe or some other USB interface) and save as you go, but that's a heftier option, especially if you are playing away from home.