In Search of Stupidity Book Review
In Search of Stupidity: Over 20 Years of High-Tech Marketing Disasters
Second Edition by Merrill R. Chapman
Book Review by Brian Lawley
January, 2007
We first reviewed this book back in 2003 shortly after it was first released. The title (and the content) are a play on the famous book by Tom Peters called "In Search of Excellence", but rather than giving examples of excellence it tells the legendary stories of tech companies that have made big mistakes. Covering everything from the early operating system wars to consumer product such as the ipod, this book is packed full of brilliantly stupid blunders that have caused companies grief, and in many cases cost them billions of dollars in revenue and lost market share.
The new edition includes additional content that is particularly fun and insightful, such as the famous Google privacy press debacle and the Salesforce.com marketing campaign that offended the Dali Llama from Tibet. I also particularly enjoyed the chapter on avoiding stupidity, especially the section called "Never Trust (or Hire) Anyone Over Thirty". There is also an interesting interview with Joel Spolsky of www.joelonsoftware fame.
In Search of Stupidity is an entertaining and easy book to read. If you are in high-tech this is a must-read - reading it and understanding the blunders that have occurred just might help you avoid committing an un-reversible career-killing move. We give this book 5 out of 5 stars.
In Search of Stupidity by Merrill Chapman
Review written by Will Iverson. October 2003
Excerpts and Illustrations available at www.insearchofstupidity.com
Brian Lawley and I were in San Francisco recently, checking out the latest comings and goings at LinuxWorld. We wandered up to the Apress book booth, when a bald fellow pointed out a book and said, "good looking guy on the front, huh?"
It turned out that the bald guy on the front was the model for the cover of "In Search of Stupidity: Over 20 Years of High-Tech Marketing Disasters," by Merrill R. Chapman (Apress, 2003, ISBN 1-59059-104-6). I wound up picking up a copy, reading it over Thai food and retelling the stories inside to smug friends - all certain that they would never be so foolish. Oh no, those of us with the benefit of a rich intellect and broad experience, would never make such mistakes.
At first blush, "In Search of Stupidity" sounds like one of those "anti-pattern" books popular in certain corners of the technology press. I originally expected something along the lines of a series of case studies, each explaining what went wrong in a fairly clear fashion, with prescriptions for avoiding such mistakes in the future.
Instead, the book reads much more like an engaging history of the PC software world. As a Mac user through the late eighties and early nineties, I mostly looked upon the PC world with a mixture of horror and bafflement. I couldn't understand why anyone would want to deal with all of the cruft and annoyances. This book walks you through the product management and product marketing mistakes of the PC world in a clear, amusing, interesting fashion. I'm still glad I skipped all of this nonsense and bought Macs instead, but it's very, very informative and entertaining.
There's a certain emotional and instinctual perspective that comes from real world experience - you have to actually have Steve Jobs screaming at you to really understand the situation at Apple, for example. You need to actually be sitting in a meeting and have the director of a group inform you in complete seriousness that their strategy for dealing with their open source competition is "fear, uncertainty, and doubt." Or be in a group meeting where a product manager stands up and announces that the strategy for getting market share is to drop the price of the flagship product from $999 to $49. I (and most of us at the 280Group) have been in just such situations (and seen the crash-and-burn results), but sometimes you just don't have that, uhh, luxury.
The next best thing is reading about it, and this book does an admirable job of explaining, informing and entertaining. If it manages to save you from a single product- or company-killing mistake, it's more than worth the $17.49 Amazon.com currently charges.
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In Search of Stupidity is copyrighted by Merrill Chapman. This review of in search of stupidity is copyright 2007, 280 Group LLC>