Book Review: In Search of Stupidity – 21 years of high-tech marketing disasters
In 1982 Tom Peters profiled 40 companies who matched a series of qualities, and subsequently wrote an iconic book called “In search of excellence” based around his findings. Unfortunately the criteria chosen to judge these companies wasn’t particularly effective, and in the decades following the publication of the book several of the companies have gone down the drain in spectacular fashion.
Inspired in a sense by Peters’ efforts, Rick Chapman set out to record those companies who sit at a sharp remove from these paragons of “excellence” – the institutions who exhibit an almost masochistic tendency to fly in the face of common sense and intelligence. In a previous post I discussed the perils of schadenfreude, now it’s time to do a complete one-eighty and bask in delight at others misfortune.
Chapman had a priviliged vantage point from which to scribe his story during the early eighties. He had a varied career which placed him in product meetings, trade shows, and boardroom collaborations that offered a world of opportunity for a writer with a dark sense of humour. This sense of humour was fortunate, as some of the car-crash scenes he witnessed firsthand would require the patience of Job.
In search of stupidity succeeds in being both very informative and very funny. Some of the anecdotes and strategic decisions are so ludicrous that they could easily have been conceived by Dilbert’s pointy haired boss. Relating these errors to a business context I ask “What could a software company learn from the misfortunes of these once great companies?”.
Support your development community – At Ashton-Tate, Ed Esber alienated, insulted, and sued-out-of-existance any companies or individual developers working on add-ons or companion products to their dBASE products. The end result of this ‘strategy’ was that this huge base of dBASE supporters jumped ship.
Don’t bait bigger dogs – At the helm of Netscape, Marc Andressen continually badgered Bill Gates and Internet Explorer. Microsoft made it a personal mission to raze Netscape to the ground, and with a little help from Netscape themselves, succeeded.
Don’t rewrite from scratch – Rewriting your code from scratch throws out all the bugfixes that have accumulated over the years, and gives your competition time to implement new features.
Don’t dillute your brand – Introducing competing products into the same market as your mainstay (a la the MicroPro word processor) just confuses your customers, and erodes your original market share. In MicroPro’s case, it also meant developing on two fronts for the same market, a complete duplication of effort which resulted in two mediocre products instead of one star.
This book is a very enjoyable read and makes a welcome change from some of the heavier volumes I’ve been reading recently. The author manages to cover the incidents that he witnessed without lowering himself to cynicism and vitriol, and the tone remains light and very funny. Recommended.
