The stats (as they are quoted here) are just exactly what you would expect to see if you looked at early adopters.
New products typically fail. If you are a consistent early adopter, you will buy a lot more failures than someone who sticks to tried-and-tested products.
If anything, "twice as many" is lower than I would have thought. In my opinion, this suggests that early adopters are rare - that there isn't a novelty-seeker type of person who goes around trying new products for the sake of it.
What they should be measuring is slightly different than this. If these people buy a new product, does that make the product more likely to fail than it would otherwise? (Given that the product is likely to fail anyway)
As I've understood, this stricter statistic is not seen in the article. Even if we could identify people like that, I would put those people into the category of "temporarily unlucky early adopters" and would not expect them to have predictive power.
With that in mind, the conclusion of the article seems nonsensical.
New products typically fail. If you are a consistent early adopter, you will buy a lot more failures than someone who sticks to tried-and-tested products.
If anything, "twice as many" is lower than I would have thought. In my opinion, this suggests that early adopters are rare - that there isn't a novelty-seeker type of person who goes around trying new products for the sake of it.
What they should be measuring is slightly different than this. If these people buy a new product, does that make the product more likely to fail than it would otherwise? (Given that the product is likely to fail anyway)
As I've understood, this stricter statistic is not seen in the article. Even if we could identify people like that, I would put those people into the category of "temporarily unlucky early adopters" and would not expect them to have predictive power.
With that in mind, the conclusion of the article seems nonsensical.