Gorilla warfare

[Laurence Horn]

At 9:10 AM -0400 10/1/03, James A. Landau wrote:
>Has anyone run across the phrase "tipping point".  I don't recall having
>heard it before, then in the past week I saw it twice on-line.

There was a best-selling book by journalist Malcolm Gladwell on the
concept that got a lot of play in the media a couple of years ago.
I'm sure if you did a study there would be a spike just as Gladwell's
book was published (one of his examples was the effect on crime rates
in NYC of the prosecution of quality-of-life crimes in the early
90's), and then a gradual decline since then, but references still
pop up periodically.
>
>The context was marketing of software and the sense was something like "this
>product has now reached a sufficiently large market share that everybody will
>start buying it so as to be compatible with the rest of the world".
>
>The closest synonym that I can think of is, of all things, "critical mass".

Similar idea, but the two can't be used interchangeably, whence the
utility of the "tipping point" metaphor.  (Whether or not the
phenomenon itself has been accurately described.)

Larry