Customer Reviews

In Search of Stupidity: Over Twenty Years of High Tech Marketing Disasters

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

In Search of Stupidity gets its title from the classic, albeit infamous business book In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America's Best-Run Companies, by Tom Peters and Robert Waterman. In Search of Excellence quickly became a best-seller when it came out in 1988 and launched a new era of management consultants and business books. But in 2001, Peters admitted that he falsified the underlying data. Librarians have been slow to move the book to the fiction section.

In Search of Stupidity is not a traditional business book; rather, it's a high-level analysis of marketing mistakes made by some of the biggest and most well-known high-tech companies over the last 20 years. The book contains numerous stories of somewhat smart companies that have made stupid marketing mistakes. The catastrophe is that these mistakes have led to the demise of many of these companies.

For those who have been in technology for a while, the book will be a somewhat nostalgic look at what has happened over the years from the world of high-tech marketing. Combined with Chapman's often hilarious observations, the book is a most enjoyable and fascinating read and is hard to put down once you start.

The first chapters of the book discuss the story and mythology around the origins of DOS. It details such luminaries as Digital Research, IBM, Microsoft, Bill Gates and Gary Kildall and more. The first myth about Microsoft is the presumption that the original contract with IBM for MS-DOS gave Microsoft an immediate and unfair advantage over its competitors. The reality is that over time, MS-DOS did indeed become Microsoft's cash cow; but it took the idiocy of Apple, IBM and others to make this happen.

The book also notes that throughout its history, Microsoft would consistently make the most of its competitor's mistakes and stupidity to its advantage. The book repeatedly notes that yes, Microsoft has not always been ethical or nice; but the reality is that such behavior has also been practiced by many in the software industry. Not that it rationalizes what Microsoft has done, and to a degree still does. But it is unfair to pinpoint Microsoft as the sole miscreant in the dirty software waters.

For the better part of the last decade, Microsoft has owned the desktop. But that was not always the case. In the early 1990's IBM was frantically working on its nascent OS/2 operating system, working alongside Microsoft as a trusted partner. IBM had the cash and talent to ensure that OS/2 would own the desktop. So why did OS/2 miserably fail? It was primarily IBM's own ineptitude in marketing OS/2 which led to Windows 95 taking over the desktop. The desktop was IBM's to lose and that is precisely what it did.

Microsoft at one point was working with IBM to develop OS/2 and many have written that Microsoft took advantage of IBM in that joint effort. But Chapman writes that complete and direct responsibility for the failure of OS/2 falls completely on IBM. He notes that it is difficult to find a marketing mistake around OS/2 that IBM did not make. At the time, the market was ready to accept almost any GUI and it was Microsoft that gave the people what they wanted. It was not so much that Microsoft beat IBM; rather that IBM imploded with OS/2 and Microsoft was there to pick up the pieces.

As to ownership of the desktop, Chapman notes that even with Microsoft's near endless budget, bullying tactics, and use of the FUD factor, those alone did not enable Microsoft to monopolize the desktop operating system market. Chapman notes that the following key factors, all which are unrelated and out of Microsoft's control had to take place in order for that to happen.

First, Xerox, the original inventor of the GUI had to never develop a clue about how to commercialize the groundbreaking product that came out of its own labs. Digital Research then had to blow off IBM when it came calling to them for an operating systems for the original IBM PC. IBM would then have to fall victim to Microsoft during its joint development of OS/2.

Finally, Apple would have to decide not to license the Macintosh operating system. That decision led Apple to have a 30% share of the desktop market in the early 1990's to its current irrelevant 4% share.

Chapman lists numerous secondary factors that also contributed to Microsoft's dominance. While the accepted wisdom is that Microsoft single-handedly cornered the desktop operating system market; the reality is that the ultimate success of Microsoft is as much a result of their near endless good luck combined with the recurring stupidity of its competition.

The stupidity of IBM and Apple gave the desktop market to Microsoft. Similarly, Novell gave the NOS market to them. In the mid-1990's, Novell owned the NOS market. Netware along with myriad CNE's (Certified Network Engineerswere the dominant force in network computing. When Windows NT version 3.1 shipped (it was really version 1.0), it was clearly inferior to Netware, as myriad product reviews stated.

Yet a few years later, Windows NT was the dominant NOS and Novell was struggling. While Netware was clearly superior to NT from a functionality perspective, the genius of Microsoft was that it knew better how to deal and communicate with its development community. Today, Netware is an irrelevant NOS and Novell has effectively abandoned it to primarily focus on its Linux strategy.

Exactly at the same time Microsoft was pushing Windows NT and wooing developers, Novell shutdown its third-party development center in Austin, TX. Novell also became preoccupied with its misguided purchase of WordPerfect. Novell developers were left hanging until Microsoft came calling with its promises of NT development and marketing support. Similarly, it was Novell failures that directly lead to the success of Windows NT.

Novell had myriad chances to decimate Windows, but it never stepped up to the plate. Novell's inexperienced marketing department thought that "if you built a great NOS, they would come." But come they did not, and leave Netware they did.

It is chapter 10 that will likely give Slashdot readers a fit. The author attempts to set straight additional myths around Microsoft: that their products are of poor quality, that they have only succeeded because of its market monopolies, that they are not innovative, and more. For those who want all of the details, they should read the book. But the authors notes for example that while Microsoft has been widely criticized for not being an innovative company, it is no different from companies such as Lotus, Borland, Xerox and more.

Most recently, when Microsoft found itself behind the 8-ball and lacking a browser, Internet Explorer was quickly developer and in time, surpassed the capability of Netscape Navigator. By 1998, most reviews were giving IE a higher rating than Navigator. Of course, Microsoft has more cash and developers than Netscape, but that alone was not what doomed them. Simultaneously, Netscape derailed itself in an attempt to completely rewrite Navigator in Java. This led them to the state where they would permanently fall behind Microsoft in the development race.

The book contains 12 chapters each with a different set of stupid marketing actions. Rather than simply being a Monday morning quarterback, chapter 14 contains an analysis of each scenario and what the respective companies should have done.

In Search of Stupidity: Over Twenty Years of High Tech Marketing Disasters is a most valuable book and is a wonderful read for anyone in the software industry. For those in sales and marketing, it is clearly required reading, and in fact, should be reread periodically. While In Search of Excellence turned out to be a fraud, In Search of Stupidity is genuine, and no names have been changed to protect the guilty.

The book "In Search of Stupidity" gives an overview of many of the mistakes made by various companies in the computer hardware and software fields. Chapman attempts to dissect some of these mistakes with a view toward helping people understand and prevent them from making the same mistakes.

Although many of the stories are insightful, not all of the stories match what I remember from the time. It is, of course, the author's prerogative to write about the stories that he finds most interesting or that prove his point best.

I do find it interesting that the author avoids almost any mention of mistakes made by Microsoft. There is no mention of the fact that they nearly lost the programming languages market to Borland in the late 80s. There is no mention of the fact that the technology they used to "beat Netscape" was bought from Spyglass Software. There was no mention of the lawsuit they lost to a little company named Stack.

My only problem with this is the spin given to suggest that Microsoft has always been the best of the best technically and that their technology and a little luck has made it to the top. I think it might have served the author's story better to show how Microsoft made some missteps and overcome them with marketing, PR, and legal action as needed. I know this comment risks having Chapman label me a "Microsoft hater" as in the "review" below, but it is my opinion, nonetheless.

I was also confused a bit by the 6-page interview of Joel Spolsky at the end of the book. Chapman doesn't interview anyone else anywhere in the book. This interview also serves mostly to highlight some of Spolsky's pet peeves, but it doesn't seem to really support the book's premise.

All in all, it is an interesting look at many of the mistakes in our industry. If you are a Microsoft-lover, you'll love the way the author shows that they can (almost) do no wrong. If you have any other opinion, the middle third of the book may be rough going.

I have been in IT since '79 and have seen all the companies Rick talks about come and go. The errors that were made, and still -are- made are mind boggling. All these proverbs about history repeating itself? They are right, when you don't learn from mistakes!

I'm a self-admitted nerd with a strong interest in the psychology of marketing, yet somehow this book wasn't quite pitched right. That's quite ironic considering the subject. The book is actually about the (micro)computer hardware and software rise from the early 1980s through the dot-com businesses of 2000. I didn't catch any of that in the long-winded title. I assume a marketing genius would try to convey some portion of that message in the title, but no. (Then again, I did pick up the book and read it, so maybe it worked after all.)

It's not so much a lesson in how to avoid marketing disasters as it is a series of vignettes about what happened the wrong way at just the wrong time. The author makes some good points, but as a whole the book tends to come off as a long-winded resume of the places where he'd been that failed, and his ability to get out just before they crashed. He seemed to have been in the middle of many meltdowns, but was never persuasive enough to change the course of history.

What I found most interesting was that the span of the book fairly well encapsulates my lifetime, and I didn't realize just how pivotal these years were for computing. I kind of grew up with it without giving it a second thought, so it was fun to revisit some memories and fill in the details of a story I was too young to understand at the time.

The book is well-done and has some of the best software anecdotes... and discussions of marketing... that I have read in quite some time. I'm not in the software biz, but i have always been fascinated by it... and how its personalities can enhance, and in the cases you cited, undermine what are often very good products. I have been a marketer all of my career, and i felt that the paragraph on p 276 starting with "And then an awful realization..." was one of the best descriptions of what B2B marketing managers face and how difficult marketing management can be that i have ever encountered. I recommend the book highly for both entertainment and for marketing insights.

This is the updated version of Chapman's book on errors of judgement and strategy in the computer industry that had massive repercussions for those companies involved. This book is neither extremely technical nor is it completely a business book, instead it is a look at various facets of the computer industry that went wrong. Rick Chapman has been a jack of all trades with various computing industry leaders. He is therefore in a position to talk about the industry's biggest mistakes, often from an insider's point of view. The following are the book's chapters:

1. Introduction

2. First Movers, First Mistakes - IBM, Digital Research, Apple, and Microsoft: Contrary to popular belief, there were many thriving microcomputer hardware companies before IBM came on the scene. This chapter talks about how the companies involved in this business disappeared from the scene.

3. A Rather Nutty Tale - IBM and the PC Junior: The PC Junior was one of the most unexpected computer failures ever launched. Its keyboard was awkward and it cost twice as much as much as the Commodore 64.

4. Positioning Puzzlers - MicroPro and Microsoft: Micropro offered two nearly identical word processing software packages. The public would buy neither of them because they thought that eventually one of them would be pulled off the market. Microsoft then stepped in and took over that market.

5. We Hate You, We Really Hate You - Ed Esber, Ashton-Tate, and Siebel Systems: The only reason dBASE was a feasible product at all was because outside developers hacked out software solutions that made the product usable. Seeing these developers as potential targets of lawsuits rather than unpaid partners, CEO Esber's legal threats ended the development of these third-party products, the usefulness of dBASE, and ultimately Ashton-Tate.

6. The Idiot Piper - OS/2 and IBM : IBM's name of "Warp" for its operating system OS/2 was supposed to be associated with "warp speed" ala Star Trek. However, IBM neglected to get the legal rights sewed up with Paramount before the product launched. The public, confused as to what the word "Warp" had to do with an operating system, was not anxious to go out and buy it.

7. Frenchman Eats Frog, Chokes to Death - Borland and Philippe Kahn: Philippe Kahn, the CEO of software maker Borland, built himself an expensive office complex complete with recording studio and began recording his own music. Paying attention to Borland's shrinking market share caused by the release of Microsoft Office would have been a better use of his time and money.

8. Brands for the Burning - Intel, Motorola, and Google: Talks about the two origins of brand recognition and uses three companies as examples of branding.

9. From Godzilla to Gecko - The Long Slow Decline of Novell: As the Internet era began, it was just business as usual at Novell. Novell stayed stuck in 1995-era technology and solutions as Microsoft and the open source community began providing the needed communication tools for a new era.

10. Ripping PR Yarns - Microsoft and Netscape: Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape, taunted Microsoft into competing with him in the browser wars. Netscape, with its superiority complex and lack of concern over usability, was ultimately pummeled.

11. Purple Haze All Through My Brain - The Internet and ASP Busts: Takes you up to and through the Internet and ASP meltdowns. The chapter starts by showing that banner advertising was e-commerce's first really bad idea. Once the novelty of banners had worn off, response rates plunged.

12. The Strange Case of Dr. Open and Mr. Proprietary: The story of open versus proprietary software.

13. On Avoiding Bad Mistakes: The author gives some sage advice including: study the history of your own particular industry, study and understand the context of your market, determine which of several specific types your own company is, never underestimate the damage that inexperienced youth can have on your operation, remember that the best generals hire the best generals, and avoid "siloization" where each key group doesn't recognize the value of the other key groups within the company.

14. Bad Analyses

This is a fun and accessible book, and I recommend it for anyone who works with technology.

This is the second edition of Merril R. Chapman's best-seller In Search of Stupidity. To the first edition's collection of episodes of strategic blunders, marketing disasters and outright hubris on part of various high-technology companies during the 80's and the 90's, the new edition adds a few notable episodes. Companies listed include: IBM, Digital Research, Apple, Microsoft, MicroPro, Ashton-Tate, Siebel, Borland, Intel, Motorola, Google, Novell, Netscape, and various dot-coms from the Internet bubble times.

Apart from being a fun and enjoyable read, In Search of Stupidity is also a valuable resource for high-tech entrepreneurs, marketers and geeks wanting to turn their technical prowess into a profit. There's nothing like learning from the mistakes of others in order to avoid repeating them, and one of the merits of this book is that it does not limit itself to making fun of clueless companies, but extracts and digests from their tales a number of immediately useful advice.

So you can expect to learn how to avoid the same sort of positioning mistakes that doomed MicroPro, how not to inimicate the developer community that constitutes the lifeblood of your products, like Ashton-Tate constantly did, how to avoid damaging your relationships with the press, and many other useful tidbits. In this respect, the Stupid Analysis chapter at the end of the book is especially useful, in case you missed some of the more subtle lessons that were contained in the narrative presented in previous chapters.

In summary, this books is valuable both to entrepreneurs and managers, and to geeks who want to enter marketing, management or start their own company. Even if you are content with keeping a purely technical role, should you start recognizing the signs of stupidity on part of your company, you could at least be prepared to polish up your resume.

To be honest, it could be argued that some of the most egregious screw-ups described in the book were, at least in part, due to sheer bad luck, and that hindsight is always 20/20. Still I think that the stories told here teach some extremely valuable lessons. External circumstances alone cannot account for all that happened; it takes much stupidity and arrogance to turn unfavorable events into total disasters.

If you want to be picky, there is a couple of instances where the message of the book sounds a bit off. The first one can be found in the story of Google's fight with [...] over the issue of privacy, and its supposed bowing to the censorship imposed by the Chinese government. You can argue how much you like that Google acted stupidly in these circumstances. Its behavior might have tarnished its ethical image--"Don't be evil", remember?. However, it doesn't seem to have affected Google in any serious way; few people remember the episodes and Google is going as strong as ever. Compared to the other examples found in the book, this is a case of very mild stupidity, if at all, and it looks like Chapman seriously wanted to pick on Google but couldn't find any real damning evidence.

The second point is in chapter 12, The Strange Case of Dr. Open and Mr. Proprietary, where the author traces the beginnings of the Free Software movement to the first hackers who started out by illegally copying Microsoft's Altair BASIC. If one didn't know better, one might start to think that Free Software pioneers were just a bunch of freeloaders, if not thieves. In the rest of the chapter, however, Chapman makes it abundantly clear that the only example of stupidity, in this case, can be found on the side of proprietary companies who failed to understand the Open Source/Free Software movement and its effect on the software industry.

To sum it up, In Search of Stupidity is a very good book, especially if you missed the first edition. Five stars are well deserved.

This book is a review of IT screw-ups from the late 70's up til the early 2000's. The author looks at a number of failed companies, some of which he worked for, and analyzes why they went out of business. As you might guess from the title this is done sardonically.

Here's a sample of some of the snafu -
Overpricing product: CPM, OS2
Alienating 3rd party vendors: dBase
Releasing two products that do the same thing: Word Star vs WordStar 2000
Not giving the users what they want: Netware (No GUI).
Re-coding from scratch when you don't have to: Netscape
Not admitting when your product flat out doesn't work: Intel pentium's math problems

Pros -
It's a fun read.
It's really interesting to learn what went on behind the scenes at some of these places.
There are some valuable lessons in here. If you work in IT it wouldn't be a bad idea to keep these companies in mind and try to avoid their mistakes.

Cons - Some of these cases are a little dated. If you aren't interested in hearing about consumer IT in the 1980's you might not dig this. Also, sometimes the author tries too hard to make a joke.

Chapman is a great writer, and he really brings to life (in an amusing way) the foibles that were made by the key players on the road to high-tech. The huge blunder made by Digital Research, Atari, IBM, et al., are put in their historical context as cautionary tales, and some myths are rebutted.

Depressingly, this also reminds us that it is not always the best and brightest that survive and thrive: witness the death of CP/M and the Dvorak keyboard, versus the rise of Microsoft and QWERTY, for example.

There is another note of caution sounded here, and that is to beware of fads. Problem is, at the time, it would take a pretty sober and objective mind to resist, let alone identify them as such. Back then it was "In Search of Excellence," which was, as we now know, made of fake data; today, we have global warming and so on.

As an aside, the tales here also prove that the course of history is determined not by accidents of resources and geography a al Jared Diamond but rather by unpredictable decisions made by key players. To think otherwise is to ignore the main driving force of the human experiment, the human mind - unfortunately, one that cannot be explained by materialism, but the elephant in the room nevertheless.

This book, IMO, is written like a Porsche is built: fast, fun, and nimble. Though I picked it up because of its subject matter (computers, software), I also enjoyed it for a second reason: the quality of the writing.

Apparently, the author's career is not as a writer, but you'd never tell it from how well this book is written- humor, irony, and descriptiveness are wound artfully through most of his descriptions.

Take, for example, this passage, where he's discussing the marketing of the Ford Mustang vs. the Ford Falcon- to illustrate how IBM's mistakes with the PC Jr. shared some things in common with Ford's mistakes with the Falcon:

"Mustangs were fun, sexy, and desirable. Mustang owners were intelligent and cool people with a great sense of value, the type of folks you wished would invite you to a barbecue at their place. Of course, the Mustang, <like the Falcon> also wouldn't go very fast (though it looked like it could), got good gas mileage, and was very economical to run. This is because it was, underneath its alluring sheet metal, nothing more than a reskinned Ford Falcon. But by dint of good design, ... the Mustang became a car you could aspire to, whereas the Falcon was just a cheap set of wheels."

That's a lot more interesting to read, IMO, than most high-tech history books, or marketing manuals.

Yet, the author wraps in lots of value in those areas, as well. The book is filled with history, in a level of detail that only an insider (which he was) could know, and marketing insight, with a nuts-and-bolts examination that makes sense out of large & complicated industry situations.

I've really enjoyed reading, and dipping back into, this book. I almost never open up books after I've read them, but this one is an exception. I find myself keeping it around where I can get to it easily- and reading excerpts just for the fun of it. IMO, this guy's writing is great.

Perhaps that's why this book reminds me of a Porsche: it's valuable, it's well-designed, but better yet, you find yourself having fun while you're also getting someplace.