Adopter Categories and Saddles, revisited: Innovators, Main Market and Laggards, where are they today?

We replicate the paper on adopter categories by Mahajan, Muller and Srivastava (1990) and on saddles by Goldenberg, Libai and Muller (2002) on new data, and offer explanations and extensions. While previous studies have chronicled the relative sizes of the categories and the prevalence of saddles on datasets that were available at the time, two decades have passed since these papers have been published, wherein a multitude of technologies were introduced (e.g., social media, smartphones, media streaming). We use a new dataset to replicate the results, namely the U.S. Consumer Technology Sales & Forecasts that provides longitudinal data on numerous consumer electronic products. Goldenberg, Libai and Muller utilized the same source for 1999, while we use the updated 2019 report for the adopter category as well as the saddle replication, thus using the same data source for both studies.