Tom Bollard, with his navman. Photo / Chris Skelton

Tom Bollard, with his navman. Photo / Chris Skelton

The day Microsoft launched its new computer operating system Windows Vista, Amit Govind walked into Dick Smith Electronics and paid $650 for the most expensive version available.

Only three copies of Vista Ultimate were on the shelf at the time. The retailer obviously wasn't expecting a stampede of customers for it.

Govind, a 26-year-old software developer from Wellington, is what is known to marketers of technology products as an "early adopter".

He's ahead of the curve - quick to buy and use new technology and prepared for it not to work exactly as promised.

"It was not an impulse buy," says Govind of his Vista purchase.

"I put money aside, I did my homework. And I've no loyalty to any brand. I'm not a fan boy of Apple or Windows, Nokia or Sony Ericsson."

Govind sits at a crucial point in the "technology adoption lifecycle", a model created by academics in the 1950s that divides people into innovators, early adopters, the early majority, the late majority and finally laggards.

Simon Kemp, a lecturer in the psychology department at Canterbury University, says one theory is that if manufacturers want a new product to take off they need to convince the innovative consumers to adopt it and then tell their friends about it.

In the case of products like the hugely successful iPod music player, he adds, this obsession with early adopters has more than paid off.

"The marketing strategy has worked. They got the early adopters to use them. These things have gone past the innovative stage now and spread throughout society."

Psychology research involving people who had invested early in the volatile technology sector during the dotcom boom shows they had a propensity for taking risks, Kemp says.

"It turned out that people who bought shares in those companies were notably different in personality tests to the people who bought shares in ordinary companies," he says. "They generally liked to take risks."

He believes the same goes for early adopters of technology who now seem to constitute an expanding group. As consumers become more comfortable with technology, thanks to the Apple iPod, Google, the Motorola Razr and the Sony PlayStation, they have in turn become quicker adopters of new technology - more comfortable with the risk of buying in early.

The tech sector is prospering as a result, having learned to leap the metaphorical chasm outlined in Geoffrey Moore's 1991 book Crossing the Chasm. Moore made a fortune advising Silicon Valley tech companies on how best to push products from early adopters to the mass market.