stomper
Guest
Very reasonable and thorough, Jason, as usual -- thanks.
As I was reading this little history of the modern barefoot running movement, I kept wondering about the central metaphor of the "product adoption life cycle" ... Is it relevant when everybody already has feet?
On the other hand in some ways I think the metaphor could be extended even farther, and you left out an important part of the story: the current attempts by some in the industry to sow Fear Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD!) about abandoning heavy running shoes. Road Runner Sports and its infamous (among people like us anyway) memo about pea sized pebbles, Brooks and its slicker approach, using the whole "it's only for people with perfect biomechanics" line.
The tempest-in-a-teapot over barefoot running has reminded me more than anything of the storms over the adoption of open source software like Linux and gandhi's (misattributed? but relevant) "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."
With gnu/linux, in the beginning it was just some total weirdos. Then a select group of people started seeing how useful it was to them and how it created lots of new opportunities. As their successes echoed, big corporations started laughing at it, and then calling it poison. Remember when Microsoft's CEO called Linux a cancer? Smarter corporations (IBM, say) saw what was happening and started making open source part of their business.
Now it's reached a point where open source, as a working method and a potential part of a business operation, is everywhere, and often turns out to be a superior option. No, Linux isn't the desktop of choice for most casual users but every computer user every day uses open source tools whether they know about it or not, like Wordpress, apache, mysql, etc.
I find it especially interesting that open source as a movement once had a kind of left-wing feel, but now that its adoption is widespread people of all political persuasions are using it. Including my favorite anti-barefoot henchman!
I feel like barefoot running is going to end up like that. Something that almost every runner will use sometimes and without thinking it's part of their value system. But only a few will be running barefoot all the time, and it'll be more a curiosity or an annoyance than something that will make running shoe vendors livid.
As I was reading this little history of the modern barefoot running movement, I kept wondering about the central metaphor of the "product adoption life cycle" ... Is it relevant when everybody already has feet?
On the other hand in some ways I think the metaphor could be extended even farther, and you left out an important part of the story: the current attempts by some in the industry to sow Fear Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD!) about abandoning heavy running shoes. Road Runner Sports and its infamous (among people like us anyway) memo about pea sized pebbles, Brooks and its slicker approach, using the whole "it's only for people with perfect biomechanics" line.
The tempest-in-a-teapot over barefoot running has reminded me more than anything of the storms over the adoption of open source software like Linux and gandhi's (misattributed? but relevant) "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."
With gnu/linux, in the beginning it was just some total weirdos. Then a select group of people started seeing how useful it was to them and how it created lots of new opportunities. As their successes echoed, big corporations started laughing at it, and then calling it poison. Remember when Microsoft's CEO called Linux a cancer? Smarter corporations (IBM, say) saw what was happening and started making open source part of their business.
Now it's reached a point where open source, as a working method and a potential part of a business operation, is everywhere, and often turns out to be a superior option. No, Linux isn't the desktop of choice for most casual users but every computer user every day uses open source tools whether they know about it or not, like Wordpress, apache, mysql, etc.
I find it especially interesting that open source as a movement once had a kind of left-wing feel, but now that its adoption is widespread people of all political persuasions are using it. Including my favorite anti-barefoot henchman!
I feel like barefoot running is going to end up like that. Something that almost every runner will use sometimes and without thinking it's part of their value system. But only a few will be running barefoot all the time, and it'll be more a curiosity or an annoyance than something that will make running shoe vendors livid.
