Relative advantage
An innovation will be adopted more widely when it is considered superior to the alternative solution that it replaces. The relative advantage might be measured in economic terms (the new technology is cheaper than the old, or as expensive but more powerful) but it could also be a convenience factor (receiving email is faster than writing letters and going to the post) or a status aspect (“I need this product in order to look cool”). Relative advantage is important because a new product is rarely without alternative, whether it is using digital cameras rather than analogue ones, or watching video on demand rather than renting DVDs from a DVD shop. However, relative advantage is not enough to guarantee fast diffusion speed, and the market abounds of superior technologies that never made it to success, from the Dvorak keyboard to the Betamax or Video 2000 video recorder.