In Search of Stupidity
posted in Computing & IT |
In 1982, Tom Peters and Robert Waterman, based on their study of forty-three of America’s best-run companies from a diverse array of business sectors, published the book In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best-Run Companies. The book described eight basic principles of management—basis for action, proximity to customer, autonomy and entrepreneurship, productivity through people, hands-on and value-driven, sticking to the core competencies, simple form and lean staff, and simultaneous loose-tight properties—that made these organizations successful. But a few years later, it became apparent that many of the organizations that Peters and Waterman had portrayed as the paragon of excellence were not as good as they believed.
Companies like Atari, Data General, DEC, IBM, Lanier, NCR, Wang, Xerox, etc., all listed as excellent companies by Peters and Waterman, crashed, burned or closed shop along with many other organizations. The companies, the excellent ones, were supposed to do well and become more and more successful; but they stumbled, crashed and died. What went wrong? Who are to blame? Is there a common reason for the failures?
Merrill R. Chapman is a high-technology and software consultant who have done almost all jobs in the high-tech industry from programmer, salesman, sales engineer, marketing professional, product manager, consultant and so on for a number of companies including MicroPro, Ashton-Tate, IBM, Inso, Microsoft, Novell, DataEase, Sun Microsystems, etc. According to Chapman, the high-tech companies burned down and closed shop because they failed to learn for the past mistakes (theirs and others) thereby making the same stupid mistakes again and again. In the book, In Search of Stupidity: Over 20 Years of High-Tech Marketing Disasters, he chronicles the history of the high-tech industry during the 1980s and 1990s, highlighting the stupid mistakes made by the so called ‘excellent’ companies and how they perished because of their on foolish decisions and actions.
Chapman has extensive knowledge of the industry and is familiar with most of the companies he is mentioning in the book. His narrative is gripping, engaging and often funny. His familiarity with the topics and experience with the companies give the readers details and insights that one will never find in any other book.
The book’s foreword is written by another veteran of the software industry—Joel Spolsky. The book also has an interview with Joel (Afterword), which gives some wonderful ideas and advice on how to protect your vision and career in the high-tech world.
The book contains 11 chapters, a glossary, selected bibliography and an index in addition to the foreword and Afterword. The first chapter titled Introduction gives an overview of the book, the rationale of writing the book and some examples of stupid decisions and actions.
Chapter 2—First Movers, Fist Mistakes—talks about the downfall of IBM, Digital Research and Apple, how IBM won and lost the PC market. It also tells how Digital Research threw away its opportunity to become the number one operating system vendor and how Microsoft grabbed the opportunity and went on to became a major player and started consolidating its position. The third chapter (A Rather Nutty Tales) delves into the dubious decisions that led to the creation of IBM’s different personal computers and how IBM went out of the personal computer business.
Chapter 4 (Positioning Puzzlers) explains how MicroPro threw away its position as the manufacturer of the most popular word processing package—WordStar—by a series of flawed decisions and marketing mistakes and how Microsoft nearly lost the operating system (OS) market. Both mistakes were due to poor product positioning—putting one product against another by the same company. In the case of MicroPro it was WordStar Professional against WordStar 2000; in the case of Microsoft it was Windows NT against Windows 95. The fifth chapter (We Hate You, We Really Hate You) talks about the downfall of Aston-Tate from the market leader in the DBMS segment (dBase) and how the death of its founder (George Tate) was sealed by the stupidity of his successor —Ed Esber Jr.
In Chapter six (The Idiot Piper), the author explains the how IBM killed the superior operating system OS/2 by its own stupid decisions and how Microsoft capitalized on the opportunity to become the largest OS vendor of the PC segment. Chapter seven titled Frenchman Eats Frog, Chokes to Death recounts the birth, rise and fall of Borland. Borland became one of bigger players by virtue of it products like Turbo Pascal and then stumbled by acquiring the nearly dead Ashton-Tate at an unreasonably high price. It also tells the story of how Microsoft bought Foxpro for a very competitive price thus creating a competitor for Ashton-Tate’s dBase and making customers to switch from dBase to Foxpro.
In Chapter eight (Brands for the Burning), Chapman discusses the mistakes companies made by not realizing and implementing the branding game and branding strategies. It talks about Intel’s strategy of creating the ‘Intel Inside’ brand and how it fared. It discusses how Intel mismanaged the floating point unit bug in its Pentium processor. The chapter also covers Motorola’s entry and exit into the processor market and why it failed.
The ninth chapter (From Godzilla to Gecko) discusses the events and actions that led to decline and downfall of Novell. Chapter ten (Ripping PR Yarns) talks about how the PR game is played and how Microsoft got it right most of the times and how it crushed Netscape in the Web browser market. Chapter eleven (Purple Haze All Through My Brain) gives a overview of the birth, growth, successes, failures, major players of the early days of Internet and WWW.
The book contains some of the old press clippings and advertisements that will give the readers who have not seen them a feel about the stories and events that are recounted in the book. The ample footnotes do a good job by providing a lot of background information to readers who are not familiar with the events and personalities discussed in the book. The glossary and selected bibliography add value to the book as it helps the readers in better understanding the book and also pointing where to look for more information.
This is an excellent book to all who are interested in the history of the computer industry. It describes the early days and how the industry developed and why most of the original players are nowhere to be seen. It explains, with examples, how large organizations with intelligent people could make the same mistakes again and again thereby killing their organizations. A great book on what should be avoided to succeed.
Book Details:
- Author: Merrill R. Chapman
- Publisher: Apress
- Year: 2003
- ISBN: 1590591046
- Cover & Page Count: Hardcover, 256 Pages
You can order online at Amazon.