Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(38)
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3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

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.

-- 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

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.

In writing this book, Chapman has done us the service of collecting over 20 years worth of corporate blunders. As such, MBAs entering the software industry would be well advised to read this book and save themselves from making the same strategic errors that led to the demise of earlier pioneers.

This is a man who, in the 1980s, wore those blue Adidas running shoes with the cool yellow stripes. This is a man who sat in the front row and saw everything happen with his own eyes. His observations are both astute and hilarious. Old timers reading this book will probably not know if they want to laugh or cry.

There have been reviewers who claim that Chapman's lessons are not clear. Good grief, these people haven't read the book! Rick does an incredible job of analyzing history. For example, in one chapter, he looks at the mistakes that hobbled Novell. In the 1990s, Novell decided to emphasize functionality over usability. Sure, Novell's Netware package was years ahead of the pack in terms of features. However, the engineers building Netware stubbornly insisted on sticking to a command-line interface. In short, the inmates were running the asylum.

Then, there's IBM. Chapman's autopsy of OS/2 alone is worth the price of the book. Anyone who ever tried to print documents under OS/2, or run a Microsoft application under OS/2's Windows subsystem will grimace in agreement. Big Blue made one ridiculous mistake after another. It's almost as if they were trying to kill OS/2 intentionally. After reading this book, you will see Lou Gerstner in a whole new light.

"In Search of Stupidity" offers a droll look at corporate demolition; one that will make you laugh,...until it hurts.

In Search of Stupidity is a light-hearted and witty history of the PC's first 25 years. At its core is an amusing, and well argued, premise that the monopolies of Microsoft and Intel were built on the stupidity of their competitors, as much as the technical and marketing prowess of Bill Gates' and Andy Grove's companies.

Rick Chapman is something of a marketing guru having published an industry bible. After working at most of the companies mentioned, he often recounts from first-hand experiences of the characters involved. Generally, In Search of Stupidity is highly informative for someone like me, brought up on Macs, and who used to believe the hard-luck story put about by true (Mac) believers.

According to the introduction, the idea behind the book came from In Search of Excellence, by Tom Peters, which, although phenomenally successful in terms of sales, inflicted a terrible curse on the high-tech companies that were lauded in its pages. Most of the companies praised by Peters have gone bust, and all have had some terrible problems. Chapman points out their stupid blunders for our general entertainment, and in the hope that others following on from them can avoid their pitfalls.

Although it is more fun gloating over a company's blunders than reading how we should all learn to emulate IBM, the question I had before reading the book was "could Chapman justify the use of the word stupid?" There is a difference between decisions that don't have the desired outcome, but were still reasonable decisions, and decisions that were plain stupid. If someone were to offer me $100 to correctly guess the toss of a coin, for a charge of $1, it would be a good decision to pay the $1 and take my chance. If the coin was tossed, and I lost, it would still have been a good decision to have taken the bet.

My view is that in all but two chapters Chapman makes the stupid charge stick, and when he doesn't, it is such enjoyable reading that you have to forgive him. I laughed out loud at his description of Mark Andreessen's numerous public statements as "the strategic equivalent of doing a naked bump and grind in a hungry tiger's cage with a juicy steak attached to his butt."

Overall, a hugely enjoyable and informative read for anyone with an interest in marketing, software or the history of the PC.

If you've been wondering what happened to the supposedly technology-driven economy over the last few years, and some of the much-touted players that you no longer hear of, Rick Chapman's book is a must-have as you head out to vacation.
In 20 years of consulting I've read a lot of books on strategy, marketing, impact of technology and the histories of companies and the captains of industry. But few have both the sweep and simultaneously the depth of Chapman's Stupidity. Oh, and don't be mislead by the flip title (it's in keeping with his irreverent style if you've ever seen him give a presentation) - it's a serious look at the strategic errors and bad assumptions that have driven companies and careers into the ground. Good to know if you beginning to wonder where your shop is headed.
Be advised that there are no sacred cows in Stupidity - if you hold a certain company in reverence due to their PR efforts (which he dissects in particular for Microsoft) or perhaps just industry myth and legend, he won't give them any reverence at all.
Although my expertise is in marketing and public relations, I was fascinated by the appendix on Stupid Development Tricks - which is an interview with Joel Spolsky, who some sort of product development guru. The interview brutally dissects how programmers bamboozle non-technical executives (John Sculley being my favorite example) into massive rewrites or poor development decisions - which often doom the company due to a lost window of opportunity - for all the wrong reasons.
If you are the least bit curious as to how the industry got where it is -and what happened to some of the companies and players you never hear about anymore - Stupidity should be on your bookshelf.

I bought this book of the shelf at Softpro (www.softpro.com) because I thought the title was brilliantly oxymoronic. I found the book fun to read, partly because this books story and my career in technology began at about the same time.

While some of Rick Chapman's perspectives are astute and the book is historically interesting (and mostly accurate), I did not like the writing style (an attempt at being overly prosaic which compromises an otherwise easy read), nor did I like the self aggrandizing tone (the author seems certain that he is far smarter than the dotes that have built and run America's notable companies).

Those criticisms aside, I do recommend the book, especially for technical professionals that enjoy an occasional retrospective. I enjoyed the book and it will stay on my bookself as a historical reference.

Joe Stagner
ManagedCode.com

The illustration on the front cover of the book jacket graphically describes the book's colorful content - bad things happen where there is nearly a total lack of business vision. We can presume the bald fellow with the long-vision binoculars scanning the horizon will soon be crushed by the large locomotive immediately to his back. Thus, Merrill Chapman, marketer extraordinaire, describes a number of marketing implosions, sometimes leading to the demise of a high tech product line or even a high tech company.

The book deserves to be read by people in corporate sales, marketing, product development, and executive management as case studies of what you should never allow to happen in your company. Sole proprietors take note: beware, this could happen to you, too. Although Chapman illustrates his cases with high tech examples, the products could easily have been soap powder or welding rods.

Chapman's style is breezy, personal and hard-hitting, much like Sergio Zyman [The End of Advertising as We Know it and The End of Marketing as We Know It - both must-reads]. Neither Chapman nor Zyman are shrinking violets and neither suffers from an excess of humility. If that style bothers you, then skip the book. Chapman also doesn't suffer the reader with a lot of business analysis after he describes the cases. Instead, he illustrates the points he wants to make in-line with examples. Academic types might wish for more after-the fact analysis; however, they can do that over a latte with their friends at Peets.

There are a few non-fatal weaknesses in the book, and it would be unbalanced to not mention them. In one or two instances, Chapman becomes personally abusive - almost racist - to a class of people. This is a bit unfair. Additionally, at about page 193 Chapman seems to run out of energy just as he takes on two giant icons of the Internet bubble - the Internet itself and applications service providers. Chapter 11 should have either been eliminated or re-scoped. Chapman, unfortunately does justice to neither of the two icons. And by the way, last time I checked, both the Internet and ASPs were alive and well, thank you, albeit operating at scaled-back growth but with a lot of hope, promise, and current business traction. I can personally attest that my employer is in both segments - a successful public company that is highly regarded by its customers.

The afterworlds, an interview with Joe Spolsky, a software developer, is highly enlightening and very definitely important reading for software product managers and marketers. It contains the secrets for successfully understanding and dealing with your Software Engineering counterparts.

Overall, the book deserves a solid 5-star rating for entertainment and an overall rating of 4-stars for content. It is definitely a must-read.

I'm not really a marketing weenie but I've gotten stuck with the task of acting as a marketing manager for a new release in our product line. We're a software company who builds GPS program. We've been having a lot of problems with the new release as a lot of our customers have been expressing confusion about what the new product does and why it's different from our existing program, which is selling pretty well.

A friend of mine visited the website that has excerpts of this book up and thought I might find it useful. I bought a copy and the first chapter I began reading deals with a company called "Wordstar." I've never heard of them but it was the description of what happened to them that caught my attention. Apparently they built two Wordstars, priced them the same, gave them similar features and tried to sell them to the same people.

I went into the office the next day and sat down with the company founder and read the chapter. When he was done, he looked at me and said "that's what we are doing, isn't it." And we are. Now I have to fix this mess, but at least I understand what's been going on.

I'm having this book bronzed.

Years ago, on Saturday Night Live, there was a Jeopardy skit, and one of the contestants (played by Adam Sandler) answered every question (or questioned every answer) the same way: "Who is the marketing genius who came up with this one?" (or something akin to those words). I thought about that old SNL sketch many times as I read through this fascinating book. In Search of Stupidity is in many ways a history of the personal computer business and the radical changes that have taken place over the years. All manner of companies have crashed and burned during this time. Big Blue nosedived from its place of blue-chip royalty, Netscape shot itself in the foot, countless dot.com startups dot.came and dot.went, and a shocking number of other important companies disappeared. After reading this book, one can no longer ask why Microsoft came to rule the roost; Bill Gates made fewer stupid mistakes than his would-be competitors. And, yes, stupid is not too strong a word; it's the only way to describe the suicidal deaths of so many high-tech legends of yesteryear.

This book really brought back some memories for me: visions of my old Commodore 64, for example, as well as Coleco's Adam (a system I absolutely lusted after as a kid); it also introduced me to products and services I do not remember. It's amazing to look back now and see just how differently things could have gone in the high-tech business had stupidity not taken down many an important player in the game. At one time, three companies led the way: Microsoft (with its DOS operating system), Lotus (with its spreadsheets), and Ashton-Tate (with its databases) - oh, how things have changed. Merrill R. Chapman was certainly well-placed to chronicle this list of marketing disasters; he worked for some of the companies that collapsed (a voice of common sense crying unheeded in the wilderness), owned an astounding number of early computer systems, and stood there taking the pulse of his peers at many a computer show.

Chapman looks at a number of companies here. He shows how IBM blew its chance to really steer the whole future of high-tech by depending solely on its fabled aura of invincibility (as opposed to, say, marketing or making smart decisions) - an aura which was stripped away forever by the introduction of the disappointing OS/2 operating system (which, for example, would not print to anything but IBM printers when it was finally released, well past schedule).

Then there's MicroPro, an early leader in the word processing market who (seeing that an upgrade to its successful WordStar line would never make its deadline) stupidly introduced WordStar 2000 alongside it- the fact that these were two separate products with no direct relationship to one another thoroughly confused consumers and forced the company to spend all its time trying to distinguish the two products in the public's mind. That's nothing compared to Ashton-Tate, however, which at one time marketed some five database programs at the same time. (These were the guys behind dBase, which saw itself supplanted by competitors after Ed Esber, perhaps the worst CEO in history, went out of his way to alienate everyone in the dBase community). Oftentimes, these sorts of positioning problems were an after-effect of ill-thought mergers. Not only did this sort of thing confuse consumers, it also created bitter factions within the companies themselves. Ed Esber, by the way, was not the only top dog who couldn't hold his tongue. Netscape's Mark Andreesson did his company no favors with his own seeming inability to stop running his mouth (thereby increasing Bill Gates' determination to crush Netscape like a bug); sacrificing a couple of years to needlessly rewrite the entire code of the Netscape browser in 2000 did the company no favors either, allowing Microsoft to dominate the browser market.

Even the successful companies dabbled with stupidity. Even as Intel's Dancing Bunnies cavorted across television screens declaring just how essential the new Pentium chip was, consumers discovered that the glorious new chip could not count, thanks to a fault in its math coprocessor. Microsoft fostered confusion by its "two thoroughbred" ads pushing Windows NT and Windows 95 simultaneously (seemingly unaware of the fact that a horse race can have only one winner), and Gates' maniacal assault on Netscape courted legal trouble from the Department of Justice (as did his vow to continue business as usual after securing a relatively favorable settlement in the company's first legal go-round). Apple, which was seemingly well-placed to dominate the market early on, found out the hard way that labeling potential customers "lemmings" (in a fateful Super Bowl ad) does not exactly win over the hearts and minds of the target audience.

Stupidly named products, attempts to sell a brand rather than the product or service itself (remember [...]sock puppet, who is now peddling auto loans), dependence on tradition and "invincibility" instead of sound marketing, evidence of hostility toward developers and the software community in general - all of these stupid mistakes and more are chronicled here in these pages. Here you will rediscover dinosaurs of the early high-tech industry currently residing in multiple landfills across the southwestern United States, and I can assure you that your mind will be blown by some of the suicidal decisions now-defunct companies made. Chapman is an engaging writer, making In Search of Stupidity as entertaining as it is instructive.