ComputingFailure.com: War Stories from the Electronic Revolution [Hardcover]

Robert L. Glass (Author), P. Edward Presson (Illustrator)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 10, 2001

Understanding why software projects fail is the best way to make sure yours succeeds -- and the dotcom boom and bust teaches powerful new lessons every manager and developer must heed. Now, Robert Glass, the world's #1 expert on software project failure, has brought together dozens of the latest computer disasters -- on and off the Web. These are stories ripped from the latest headlines, each annotated with practical pointers for reducing your own software risk. Robert Glass presents find failures of vision, strategy, technology, business models, leadership, partnership, and much more -- all with one thing in common: specific lessons you can learn to become a more effective manager. Among the high-profile failures Glass chronicles are: Pets.com, Wingspan Bank, Toysmart, ValueAmerica, Mortgage.com, Boo.com, Netscape, AtomicPop, TheBigStore, Inacom, Pandesic, and DrKoop.com. Glass also presents failures in the public sector, as well as the IT failures that allowed the Love Bug virus to damage enterprises worldwide. For every IT manager, software architect, software engineer, developer, and project team member.

Editorial Reviews

From the Inside Flap

Forewordby Tom DeMarco

I know this sounds weird, but success in our business is inextricably tied up with failure. The days of achieving anything important without risk-taking are over forever. Today you need to positively flirt with failure in order to achieve meaningful success. The projects that are really worth doing lie at the hairy, scary edge of feasibility. Your intimate understanding of the potential failures that may await you is surely your most potent weapon for avoiding them. You need to become an expert on failure.

But focusing on failure is something that goes against the grain. Our cultures guide us to think only of success, to concentrate on winning, not losing. That all sounds good, sounds positive. The Plan For Success mentality sounds great, but it makes risk management almost impossible. And risk management is your most effective tool in a risk-intensive world. To do real risk management, you have to develop a deep understanding of the factors that have undone those who have gone before you, understand how these factors acted and what measures proved insufficient to contain them. If such factors proved fatal to your predecessors, they may prove equally fatal to you.

Maybe you're willing to accept this idea with no more said, but (never a master of understatement) I have chosen to hammer it home anyway with a grisly word-picture: If you find yourself proceeding over a battlefield that is littered with fresh corpses and you don't know what killed them, you are in trouble. You better be thinking furiously, What did they learn at the end that I may still have to learn in the near future?

This is exactly the situation most software project managers find themselves in. They need to learn quickly about failure. Of course, the classic way to learn about failure is to make all the mistakes yourself and guide different projects to a great selection of awful conclusions. If you had already done that, you would now be a relative expert on the failures that characterize these projects. Your reputation would be in the dumpster, but your understanding of risks would be excellent. However, the cost you would have paid for the experience is too high. The trick is to gain a useful understanding of project failure mechanisms without actually failing yourself.

That's where Bob Glass's long and careful study of project failure mechanisms comes in. Over the past decade, Bob has been a keen observer of our industry and has turned his particular attention to the patterns that characterize failed endeavors. In ComputingFailure, he sets out for you a series of failure scenarios anchored in real and recent fact. Read them and profit from them. It is your understanding of these past scenarios that can help you build a future scenario for your project that has a chance of leading to success. Tom DeMarco
The Atlantic Systems Guild
Camden, Maine

From the Back Cover

Learn the lessons of today's worst software and e-Business failures!

Understanding why software projects fail is the best way to make sure yours succeeds and the dotcom boom and bust teaches powerful new lessons every manager and developer must heed. Now, Robert Glass, the world's #1 expert on software project failure, has brought together dozens of the latest computer disasters on and off the Web.

These are stories ripped from the latest headlines, each annotated with practical pointers for reducing your own software risk. You'll find failures of strategy, technology, business models, leadership, partnership, and much more—all with one thing in common. You can learn from them. And you'd better!

Detailed insights into nearly 40 failures, including...

• Pets.com
• Wingspan Bank
• Toysmart
• Interval
• ValueAmerica
• Mortgage.com
• Boo.com
• Netscape
• AtomicPop
• TheBigStore
• Inacom
• Pandesic
• And more...

Looking back, it was a time of madness: an era when billions of dollars—and even more faith—was placed in dotcom startups with inexperienced management and "Swiss cheese" business plans. Robert Glass's ComputingFailure.com is a powerful chronicle of those years, and something more: a cautionary "worst practices" guide for every entrepreneur and e-business professional.

Glass carefully chooses his case studies for the insights they impart. The executives quoted and profiled in this book have learned hard, expensive lessons—about building compelling business models, about managing growth, and about when to ignore the venture capitalists. They've learned surprising lessons about integrating with bricks-and-mortar parent companies and about what it takes to get marketing, tech, and everyone else on the same page.

And they've learned these lessons in the most vivid, unforgettable way possible: by failing.

Don't assume these causes and signs of failure apply only to dotcoms. They can affect virtually every new company—as well as many established companies ramping up e-Business and e-Commerce initiatives. But if you know about these mistakes, you're far less likely to make them. One book gets you to the heart of Web-enabled failure, and returns you safely to the "land of the living": ComputingFailure.com.

From the Foreword:"Today, you need to positively flirt with failure to achieve meaningful success. You need to become an expert on failure. That's where Bob Glass's long and careful study of project failure mechanisms comes in. In ComputingFailure.com, he sets out for you a series of failure scenarios anchored in real and recent fact. Read them and profit from them."—Tom DeMarco, author of Peopleware

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Prentice Hall PTR; Reprint edition (April 10, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0130917397
• ISBN-13: 978-0130917393
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.2 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,744,334 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Robert L. Glass held his first job in computing in 1954. Author of over 25 books, he is one of the true pioneers of the software field. He is the editor and publisher of The Software Practitioner newsletter, and has written regular columns for Communications of the ACM, IEEE Software, and Information Systems Management. In 1995 he was awarded an honorary Ph.D. from Linkoping University of Sweden, and in 1999 he was named a Fellow of the ACM professional society. His unique viewpoint and timeless (often contrarian!)writings have for decades offered insights to practitioners, managers, professors, entrepreneurs, researchers, and students alike. Recent books include Software Conflict 2.0 and Software Creativity 2.0, from developer.* Books, Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering, from Addison-Wesley, and The Dark Dide of Software Engineering, from Wiley/IEEE CS Press.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars CutAndPaste.com, July 26, 2001

By 

E. T. Veal (Chicago, Illinois USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: ComputingFailure.com: War Stories from the Electronic Revolution (Hardcover)

The editor (or, more accurately, compiler) of this volume is honest about how he put it together: He clipped interesting stories about unsuccessful dot.com companies and slipped them into a file. When the file was thick enough, he arranged the stories more or less topically, padded them with his file of recent non-dot.com "computer failure" articles, obtained reprint permissions and, voila!, produced a book (or, more accurately, a "book").

The stories are grouped into chapters, and between the chapters comes the editor's intellectual contribution, consisting mostly of jejune observations that we have all seen or thought before.

If you read The Wall Street Journal and The Industry Standard, you have already read most of this book, and the parts that you haven't read are of marginal interest. On the positive side, the articles are interesting, even though their moral is generally one that was old when Charles Dow was knee-high to a debenture: Don't throw money into an enterprise that you don't understand.

And the moral of this review is: Throw money at this book if you want a permanent anthology of schadenfreude. Otherwise, you got some bucks to invest? Right here I have the Next Great Thing. . . .

1.0 out of 5 stars Misleading Title, May 3, 2008

By 

William B. Swift (Cumberland, MD, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: ComputingFailure.com: War Stories from the Electronic Revolution (Hardcover)

I really like Robert Glass's computer books of which I've read several, but despite the title, this is NOT a computer book. This is a compilation of news reports of dot-com BUSINESS failures. There is nothing about computers in the book, except that the businesses used them. The blurb on the back of the book talks about "why software projects fail" but there is virtually nothing in the book on projects or software. Also the format is useful for illustrating ideas (for a good example see Epstein's The Case of the Killer Robot) but here there is nothing for them to illustrate - this is nothing but news reports.

I was expecting something more like Neumann's Computer-Related Risks.

2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars 3,5 stars for a very good... compilation!, July 8, 2001

By 

Manny Hernandez "@askmanny" (Bay Area, CA) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)   

This review is from: ComputingFailure.com: War Stories from the Electronic Revolution (Hardcover)

I have to admit I was drawn by the book's very provocative title, so I decided to browse through it today, to find that it is a very nice compilation of stories printed with permission, taken from publications such as the Wall Street Journal, The Industry Standard, Barron's and Time Digital.

This is not to say that the content of the stories was bad at all. On the contrary, all of these publications are highly respectable, but if you have been a close follower of the whole dot.com shakedown process over the course of the past year and a half, and expect to find insights that will allow you to better understand the underlying reasons for it, you might be dissapointed not to find any "new" ones in this book.

In short, in my opinion, the book does not add significantly to the whole discussion about the topic.