Why ChatGPT Took Off Like a Nuclear Rocket
Why ChatGPT Took Off Like a Nuclear Rocket
And What it Says About Technology Adoption More Broadly
5 Days
5 DAYS! For a chatbot.
It’s still stunning when I look at that chart. I think it’s safe to say that no technology has seen more rapid uptake than ChatGPT.
Looking at another popular generative AI segment, image making tools, MidJourney has 2.7 million users, stable diffusion has 10 million, and Dall-E is in the “some number of millions” range as well. People, these things are brand new. They’re so new and taking off so fast that they’re earning the ultimate badge of success - lawsuits.
What is it about innovations that result in some being overnight successes and others being e-waste? And why was ChatGPT the biggest overnight success, ever?
5 Critical Factors
Roger’s 5 Factors provides the explanation. If you’re a product manager, I humbly recommend that you print out the 5 Factors and tape them up on your wall. Leave a copy on your desk. Tape a copy over your monitor screen. All your monitor screens. In my 20+ years of analyzing the tech industry I have yet to encounter a technology whose success or failure couldn’t be mapped to these factors. You don’t need to nail every one to succeed, but it sure helps.
Let’s map Chat GPT to this cutting-edge framework straight out of 1962 and see what it shows.
Factor #1: Relative Advantage
Does magic have relative advantage over muggles? Because that’s what ChatGPT feels like the first time you use it - magic. You could explain some of ChatGPT’s uptake purely by its novelty, but that’s not what keeps people coming back. That’s not why I have a ChatGPT tab open in my browser at all times.
People continue to use ChatGPT because it makes work faster. As a couple personal examples, I often use it as a thesaurus on steroids:
Or I may use it to rephrase some terrible prose that I vomited onto the page:
I mean… hot damn! I’d make a few edits, but ChatGPT is a solid editor.
The uses for ChatGPT are nearly boundless:
Anyways. Relative Advantage: ✓
Factor #2: Compatibility
Compatibility refers to how easy or hard it is to use a technology as part of your existing workflow. Does it just drop in, or do you have to reinvent many of your processes to utilize it?
As an example of how compatibility kills - I could come out with the most amazing home helper robot in the world - literally, mind-blowingly good - and if it didn’t plug into a standard wall outlet and fit through a standard doorway, it would be dead on arrival. No one is remodeling their house to accommodate my robot.
ChatGPT is compatible. Very compatible. It’s as compatible as going to thesaurus.com for help. Business (and even personal) workflows are such that we hop out to the web, do something quick, and hop back - all day long. (How many browser tabs do you have open right now?) And ChatGPT is Just Another Web Site(tm).
ChatGPT is further compatible through the complete and unappreciated magic of copy/paste. It’s trivial to splat some prose in ChatGPT and ask it to summarize it, proofread it, rewrite it, turn it into a table, …
ChatGPT will be even more compatible when it (or similar technology) is just built into search engines, web browsers, word processors, and all manner of other software.
Anyways. Compatibility: ✓
Factor #3: Complexity
How hard is the new technology to learn? That’s what complexity gets at.
If the flight engineer’s panel in a 747 is on the high end of complexity, a text box and submit button must be close to the lowest end. Add in the fact that you can prompt ChatGPT with plain English (or your native language), and you have drop-dead simplicity.
Anyways. Low Complexity: ✓
Factor #4: Trialability
How hard is it to try it out? If you have to jump through a bunch of hoops, or whip out a credit card before you can do anything with a technology it has lower trialability. If you have to “rack and stack” an appliance in your data center and spin up a Proof of Concept with on-site vendor consultants, it has even lower trialability.
How’s the trialability of ChatGPT? Nearly perfect. The main speed bump is that you have to log in (frequently, for some reason). The other minor impediment is that it’s sometimes overloaded, and you have to try again later. But it’s a free web site with, basically, unlimited use.
Anyways. Trialability: ✓
Factor #5: Observability
This is a bit of an odd one, especially with business technology, but here’s an example. When you walk into a Starbucks, it is instantly apparent who’s using an Apple laptop and who’s not. Those aluminum cases with Apple logos staring back at you stand out. Observability creates social validation that a technology is a good choice.
With business software, you can’t directly observe what another company is using, so software vendors plaster logos and case studies on their sites as a proxy for direct observation.
With ChatGPT, “earned media” is doing the heavy lifting for observability.
Everyone is writing about ChatGPT. This includes regular media, thought leaders, and the curious and impressed. It’s very observable that it’s in use and is a new main character in the tech landscape.
Anyways. Observability: ✓
The Wrap
Any technology that can check all of Everett Roger’s 5 Factors has a pretty good shot at success. The stand-out factor for ChatGPT is its relative advantage. When it showed up on the scene, there was just nothing else like it. And people intuitively knew that this technology is still its infancy and will get better quickly.
Thanks for reading!
Great piece. It reminds me of Zoom—pretty much frictionless to start using, but there's no lock-in / moat. So, if/when a viable alternative comes along, no reason to stick with ChatGPT...