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In Search of Stupidity: Over Twenty Years of High Tech Marketing Disasters, Second Edition
 
 
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In Search of Stupidity: Over Twenty Years of High Tech Marketing Disasters, Second Edition (Paperback)

by Merrill R. (Rick) Chapman (Author)
4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (48 customer reviews)
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Product Description

In Search of Stupidity: Over Twenty Years of High-Tech Marketing Disasters, Second Edition is National Lampoon meets Peter Drucker. It's 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. Through the dark glass of hindsight, it provides an educational and entertaining look at why these philosophies didn't work for many of the country's largest and best-known high-tech companies.

Marketing wizard Richard Chapman takes you on a hilarious ride in this book, which is richly illustrated with cartoons and reproductions of many of the actual campaigns used at the time. Filled with personal anecdotes spanning Chapman's remarkable career (he was present at many now-famous meetings and events), In Search of Stupidity, Second Edition examines the best of the worst marketing ideas and business decisions in the last twenty years of the technology industry.

The second edition includes new chapters on Google and on how to avoid stupidity, plus the extensive analyses of all chapters from the first edition. Youll want to get a copy because it

  • Features an interesting preface and interview with Joel Spolsky of "Joel on Software"
  • Offers practical advice on avoiding PR disaster
  • Features actual pictures of some of the worst PR and marketing material ever created
  • Is highly readable and funny
  • Includes theme-based cartoons for every chapter


Book Info

Text chronicles high-tech stupidity from the past to the present; helping us to understand what companies do to fail, and what they can do to avoid making yesterday's mistakes again. Illustrated. DLC: Computer software industry--Management--Case studies. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
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4.2 out of 5 stars (48 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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5.0 out of 5 stars How to lose friends and bankrupt people, Jul 14 2006
By Daniel Jolley "darkgenius" (Shelby, North Carolina USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   
This review is from: In Search of Stupidity: Over 20 Years of High-Tech Marketing Disasters (Hardcover)
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.
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3.0 out of 5 stars Entertaining walk down memory lane., Jun 2 2004
By A Customer
This review is from: In Search of Stupidity: Over 20 Years of High-Tech Marketing Disasters (Hardcover)
The author describes his experience and observations around famous failures in software industry. The language is very entertaining. His description of MicroPro's dilemma with Word Start and Word Star 2000 'MicroPro wrestled itself to the ground' made me laugh.

Author's repeated description of 'I was there', 'I was the first one', 'I still have that floppy' etc. are boring. A bit of foot notes are good, but this book has tons.

This is a good book for entertainment. Not a great one if you want to learn something serious.

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5.0 out of 5 stars Wickedly funny with lessons to learn..., May 28 2004
By Thomas Duff "Duffbert" (Portland, OR United States) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   
This review is from: In Search of Stupidity: Over 20 Years of High-Tech Marketing Disasters (Hardcover)
In Search Of Stupidity - Over 20 Years Of High-Tech Marketing Disasters by Merrill R. Chapman (Apress) is a wickedly funny read with some very real lessons on how to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Chapman takes a look back at the first two decades of the high-tech industry to see how companies with dominant product leads squandered those advantages to become irrelevant (or non-existent). The examples are numerous... IBM and the PC, Micropro and Wordstar, Novell and Netware. He actually worked for some of the companies that are under the microscope, so there is an insider's color and flavor that you don't normally see from a customer perspective. Because of the biting style of writing, the book doesn't suffer from a lofty "anyone could see this coming" attitude that so many of these historical examinations seem to adopt.

Back to the writing style... Chapman has a satirical, wicked wit that is used to maximum advantage here. Even if you weren't terribly interested in the content, it would be worth a read for the laughs. I haven't enjoyed a business book this much in a long time.

And by the way... Don't pass up the glossary at the end. It's the cherry on top of a great sundae.

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 		 Most recent customer reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Humorous History of High-Tech Gaffes
This book is designed to be the counterpart to the Tom Peters and Bob Waterman best seller since 1982, In Search of Excellence. Read more
Published on May 17 2004 by Professor Donald Mitchell

4.0 out of 5 stars Entertaining and educational account of marketing mistakes
It was great to get to hear both some clarifications of urban legend and some reflection on what was messed up by people in the industry. Read more
Published on May 4 2004 by Lars Bergstrom

5.0 out of 5 stars Great, funny, and insightful
One thing that impressed me about the book is how Chapman *doesn't* just hit easy targets or take cheap shots. Read more
Published on April 23 2004

5.0 out of 5 stars If you don't know this, you WILL be in the next edition
This book IS timely. The DotCom busts were easy to analyze, even at the time (D'uh!) - no brick and mortar, no estute business plans, just vapor, b.s. Read more
Published on April 2 2004 by Todd Judge

3.0 out of 5 stars Not what I expected
When I picked up this book, I expected it to have more depth of recent dot-com busts than about software companies that tanked years ago. Read more
Published on Mar 29 2004 by Antonio A. Rodriguez

5.0 out of 5 stars You could not make this stuff up...
Chapman offers a caustic and often hilarious first-person Silicon Valley memoir with a biased point of view: stupid is as stupid does. Read more
Published on Mar 9 2004 by WordScarred

5.0 out of 5 stars Delightful chronicle of hi-tech industry
This is one of the best books I've read about what's gone wrong with the high-tech industry. Chapman has the answers, told through stories that are witty, and yet provide useful... Read more
Published on Feb 24 2004 by Dan Speers

5.0 out of 5 stars ROI
One of the most enjoyable books I have read regarding the business of high tech. Reading some of the previous reviews, I guess not everyone agrees. Read more
Published on Feb 24 2004

5.0 out of 5 stars A Rorschach Test for Your Company and the Industry
I bought this book after it was recommended to me by a friend who I'd worked with at Novell during the period that Merril Chapman describes, during the 90s when Microsoft was... Read more
Published on Feb 2 2004 by Dave Z

1.0 out of 5 stars There is a fundamental problem with this book...
The fundamental problem with this book is that the author only writes about dead companies where he used to work. That's fine, but hardly objective or very informative. Read more
Published on Feb 1 2004

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