How the curve is built.

News, product launches and posts I have read and sorted by what they describe. This is the part that moves the line.

What I hear every week on enterprise calls. No names, no company details, ever. It shapes the descriptions of each stage, it does not move the line.

31 named companies placed from things anyone can read: product pages, press releases, court filings, job titles and reporting. They are the dots on the curve. They illustrate each stage, they do not move the line.

1. 1. Every signal I approve gets sorted into one of five buckets by the words it uses: talking about it, trying it, running it, measuring it, governing it.
2. 2. The number on the curve is the share of those signals sitting in the last three buckets. That share is the reading, and it is what moves week to week.
3. 3. A week is locked once it is finished, then averaged over the last four weeks, so the line moves weekly and not daily.
4. 4. Limits: it measures published language, not company behaviour. Work that is never published does not appear, sorting is done on wording, and any one company can sit two groups away in either direction.

Every line is a reading of published evidence on the date I checked. It is a statement about what a company has made public, and nothing else. Private work, internal programmes and client delivery are invisible here, so a placement is never a judgement of capability.

Innovators

Published terms that other companies then have to work around.

Early adopters

Published a measurement method others can follow.

Early majority

A named, priced service or shipped product in market.

Late majority

A public artefact in progress, often labelled beta or policy only.

Laggards

Published commentary, no shipped artefact I could find in public.

Position on this curve is a reading of published evidence, not a judgement of the company. Pace is a choice, and a slower one is often the right call for the demand a business actually has.

Plenty of serious work never reaches a public page, so a company low on this curve may be well ahead of what it shows. Missing evidence is not evidence of nothing. If I have the reading wrong, send me the proof and I will move the dot.