In Search of Stupidity: Over 20 Years of High-Tech Marketing Disasters [Hardcover]

Merrill R. Chapman (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1590591046 | ISBN-13: 978-1590591048 | Publication Date: July 9, 2003 | Edition: 1

In Search of Stupidity is National Lampoon meets Peter Drucker. In Search of Stupidity is a funny and well written business book that takes a look at some of the most influential marketing and business philosophies of the last twenty years and, through the dark glass of hindsight, provides a educational and vastly entertaining examination of why they didn't work. And make no mistake, most of them did not work. Richly illustrated with cartoons and reproductions of many of the actual campaigns used at the time marketing wizard Richard Chapman takes readers on a hilarious ride through the last twenty years. Filled with personal anecdotes spanning Chapman's remarkable career (he was present at many now famous meetings and events) In Search of Stupidity takes a no holds barred look at the uncreative and hopeless marketing ideas surrounding the technology industry. It offers clear, detailed analysis of what happened, why, and what you can do to avoid acting stupidly in the future. This book offers unique insights into the avoidable mistakes made by some of the country's largest and best known high tech companies as well as succinct, to-the-point advice on how companies can avoid acting stupidly. It is aimed at people in the high tech industries, both software and hardware sides of the business. The software side is more heavily represented since software is more glamorous and highly covered than the hardware. Because it is a business book, I believe it also has appeal to the general business book market and the title should attract anyone interested in the various marketing disciplines.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Merrill R. (Rick) Chapman is the author of the first edition of In Search of Stupidity. He has worked in the software industry since 1978 as a programmer, salesman, support representative, senior marketing manager, and consultant for many different companies, including WordStar (really MicroPro, but no one remembers the name of the company), Ashton-Tate, IBM, Inso, Novell, Bentley Systems, Berlitz, Hewlett-Packard, and Ziff-Davis. His first computer was a Trash One (you antiques out there know what that is), and he began his career writing software inventory management systems for beer and soda distributors in New York City. He is the author of The Product Marketing Handbook for Software, coauthor of the Software Industry and Information Association's U.S. Software Channel Marketing and Distribution Guide, and periodically writes articles about software and high-tech marketing for a variety of publications.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: A-Press; 1 edition (July 9, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1590591046
• ISBN-13: 978-1590591048
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (65 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,183,728 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars He who does not learn from stupidity..., August 29, 2003

By 

Thomas Paul (Plainview, NY USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: In Search of Stupidity: Over 20 Years of High-Tech Marketing Disasters (Hardcover)

In 1982, Tom Peters told the world about how excellent companies were turning around the US economy. What Peters failed to recognize was that many of the companies that he was looking at weren't actually "excellent" but were in fact huge clunking dinosaurs that were producing buggy whips in the age of the automobile. New, smaller companies came around and ate the lunch of the big "excellent" guys and then proceeded to make either the exact same stupid mistakes as the big guys or new and more innovative stupid mistakes.

This book basically deals with the stupidity found in high tech companies of the 1980's and 1990's. Why is Microsoft such a huge company today? It isn't because their products were better or because they cheated other companies out of their rightful place in the market. It's because they weren't as stupid as their competition. Merrill Chapman takes us through the comedy of errors that companies like Digital Research, WordStar, Lotus, and Ashton-Tate went through as they tossed their market leads aside in fits of stupidity. You can't help but laugh (or cry) at the amazing levels of stupidity that these companies exhibited. Examples: WordStar was once one of the finest word processing programs in the world. But somehow the company ended up owning two competing mediocre products. Lotus was the leader in spreadsheets but ignored the rise of Windows and allowed themselves to be knocked out of first place by Excel. These and many more examples are well documented in this book.

The book is not an in-depth study of the business world. You won't find very much analysis of why a particular company made such obviously fatal errors. Why did Borland pay an outrageous sum to buy Ashton-Tate at a time when Ashton-Tate had virtually nothing that Borland needed? You won't find the answer here. What you will find is an amusing, well-written (without being vicious) examination of the collapse of perfectly good companies under the weight of their own serious errors of judgment.

There is a moral to be learned from this book. It isn't necessary to be excellent. In fact, excellence can be expensive and drive up your costs so much that they make your products uncompetitive. The secret is not to be excellent, in fact you don't even have to be very smart. All you need to be is less stupid that your competitors. Just ask Microsoft.

16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Stupidity: an infinitely renewable resource --, February 22, 2005

By 

wiredweird "wiredweird" (Earth, or somewhere nearby) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: In Search of Stupidity: Over 20 Years of High-Tech Marketing Disasters (Hardcover)

-- unfortunately.

This is an enjoyable, amusing, and easily digestible account of some of the multi-billion dollar horrors of the PC age. It's written in a very readable style by one of the guys who lived through a lot of it. He's not afraid to name names, and not (much) ashamed to admit that he was in the thick of some bad ones.

Long before the dot-bomb collapse around 2000, companies in the PC world had been shooting themselves in the foot, making (and repeating) insanely bad decisions, and doing everything they could to drive themselves into the ground. Many succeeded in killing themselves off, others (like IBM and Apple) did not. The recurring themes sound simply ridiculous, unless you live in this high-tech world. They they sound ridiculously familiar. They include:
* Expensive acquisitions of companies with nothing to offer,
* Demolition ("rewriting") of bread-and-butter products,
* Selling two, three, or more products that all do the same thing,
* Annoying and ignoring the customers until they all wander away, and
* Whatever it was, doing it again and again.

This mostly has an anecdotal, non-academic style, so it's an easy and enjoyable read. The dark side of that force is that Chapman isn't always strong on constructive suggestions or on the details of the analysis. Sometimes, though, it would have been psychoanalysis - personalities brash and aggressive when there wasn't that much to be brash about.

Chapman covers only the PC side of the world, so he missed some good ones. There was Apollo Computer, for example, and their steadfast determination to avoid advertising their strengths. Still, he gives plenty of cases, and gives good documentary support from the newsrags of the times.

I could have asked for a few more pointers on ways out of the stupidity trap. Simply seeing the examples is useful, though, and gives hope that readers will at least make different mistakes than the ones shown here.

//wiredweird

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Clever, but gets tiresome, March 8, 2006

By 

Jeremy Epstein (Fairfax, VA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: In Search of Stupidity: Over 20 Years of High-Tech Marketing Disasters (Hardcover)

Like many of the reviewers, I was taken in by Joel Spolsky's foreward. Like many of the reviewers, I got tired of Chapman's "I was there and I knew better". I'd disagree with the complaints of footnotes - the problem isn't that there are footnotes, but that they're relatively uninformative. I stuck with the book to the end in hopes it would get better, but it didn't.

FWIW, I was a consultant to Novell during much of the time he talks about. I think he missed the point of why Novell failed with NetWare. The real problem I saw was that all decision making was by consensus, and no one would stand up and take responsibility. So when the world started changing, they were paralyzed.

Key issues are (a) there's not enough "lessons learned", (b) he only talks about places he worked and as a result misses whole parts of the computer industry, (c) his writing style is worse than most high school students.

As one of the reviewers said, a blog published as a book. It's good bathroom reading - you can pick it up for 5 minutes, and set it down when you're done. That way the repetition and obnoxious style doesn't get so obnoxious, and you can enjoy the stories.