Rating: 
Summary: Best Business Book Ever Written
Review: I'm not really a marketing weenie but I've gotten stuck with the task of acting as a marketing manager for a new release in our product line. We're a software company who builds GPS program. We've been having a lot of problems with the new release as a lot of our customers have been expressing confusion about what the new product does and why it's different from our existing program, which is selling pretty well.A friend of mine visited the website that has excerpts of this book up and thought I might find it useful. I bought a copy and the first chapter I began reading deals with a company called "Wordstar." I've never heard of them but it was the description of what happened to them that caught my attention. Apparently they built two Wordstars, priced them the same, gave them similar features and tried to sell them to the same people. I went into the office the next day and sat down with the company founder and read the chapter. When he was done, he looked at me and said "that's what we are doing, isn't it." And we are. Now I have to fix this mess, but at least I understand what's been going on. I'm having this book bronzed.
Rating:
Summary: A Rorschach Test for Your Company and the Industry
Review: 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 tearing the guts out of NetWare and taking away our leadership in LANs. A lot of people from Novell have bought the book since it's about the only one that analyzes what happened at Novell and Chapman has just about nailed it. I'm still wondering who told him about our closing down our 3rd party development operation in Austin. I'm the president of a new startup and I've bought a couple of copies of In Search of Stupidity and I've asked my entire management staff to read it. Afterwards, I asked some of my people to tell me what they learned. A couple of my managers just shrugged and said they didn't think the book applied to them. I find that interesting because these are my weakest people. My best hires discuss the book constantly and have begun to take another look at some of our marketing programs based on some of the analysis in Stupidity. For us, the book is a very valuable guide, we've started running some of our marketing plans against the stories to make sure we're not repeating history. Chapman says he's planning a sequel and no one wants to be in it. What's also interesting about this book is the strong reactions it generates. You can tell by reading some of the reviews here. For instance, the comments by some people that the book deals only with dead companies or that the author worked for all these companies. Stupidity describes the problems at companies like Novell, Borland, IBM, Microsoft, Motorola, Intel and lots of others who are clearly still in business. And while Chapman worked for a couple of the companies he writes about, he doesn't claim to have worked for them all. Some of these reviews seem odd to me, like the person writing them hadn't actually read the book. This book seems to make some people very uncomfortable. I can imagine why.
Rating: 
Summary: Not what I expected
Review: 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. It was entertaining in certain parts, but the focus of the book seems to be solving problems in hindsight. If you don't have a time machine, you don't have that benefit, and cannot expect anyone else to have it either. It hammers the egos of many people who at the time were the heads of their organizations, laying the blame on the more prominent of these. Yet the style of the writing tends to promote the idea that the author was infallible; it seems at times that by his counting, if he had headed these organizations, he would be in the position that Bill Gates is in now. The book is very good at recounting history of computer software companies, focusing mainly on those in which the author had direct relation with, either as an employee or as a programmer using their product. In this sense, the book is worthwhile. It seems more of a biography than a heartfelt analysis.
Rating:
Summary: A page-turning history of the PC's first 25 years
Review: In Search of Stupidity is a light-hearted and witty history of the PC's first 25 years. At its core is an amusing, and well argued, premise that the monopolies of Microsoft and Intel were built on the stupidity of their competitors, as much as the technical and marketing prowess of Bill Gates' and Andy Grove's companies. Rick Chapman is something of a marketing guru having published an industry bible. After working at most of the companies mentioned, he often recounts from first-hand experiences of the characters involved. Generally, In Search of Stupidity is highly informative for someone like me, brought up on Macs, and who used to believe the hard-luck story put about by true (Mac) believers. According to the introduction, the idea behind the book came from In Search of Excellence, by Tom Peters, which, although phenomenally successful in terms of sales, inflicted a terrible curse on the high-tech companies that were lauded in its pages. Most of the companies praised by Peters have gone bust, and all have had some terrible problems. Chapman points out their stupid blunders for our general entertainment, and in the hope that others following on from them can avoid their pitfalls. Although it is more fun gloating over a company's blunders than reading how we should all learn to emulate IBM, the question I had before reading the book was "could Chapman justify the use of the word stupid?" There is a difference between decisions that don't have the desired outcome, but were still reasonable decisions, and decisions that were plain stupid. If someone were to offer me $100 to correctly guess the toss of a coin, for a charge of $1, it would be a good decision to pay the $1 and take my chance. If the coin was tossed, and I lost, it would still have been a good decision to have taken the bet. My view is that in all but two chapters Chapman makes the stupid charge stick, and when he doesn't, it is such enjoyable reading that you have to forgive him. I laughed out loud at his description of Mark Andreessen's numerous public statements as "the strategic equivalent of doing a naked bump and grind in a hungry tiger's cage with a juicy steak attached to his butt." Overall, a hugely enjoyable and informative read for anyone with an interest in marketing, software or the history of the PC.
Rating:
Summary: A Fabulous Read
Review: I heard about this book from a friend and after I saw the cover had to pick up a copy. I'm glad I did. This is a fascinating work and even better, it's about a lot of the companies I've worked with and have sometimes competed against. It's also very funny! Most business books I've read have a cookie cutter feel to them but not "Stupidity."
I almost choked on my lunch reading a section in the book called "The Dark Bunny Dream of Andy Grove." It's about Intel's
problems with its Pentium rollout in the mid-90s. I won't even try to describe it--you've got to read it for yourself. The book is also full of fascinating details and tidbits. For example, I'm an old WordStar user but I never knew the company that sold the product once tried to sell computers. I've actually ordered several copies of this book for my office staff. Stupidity doesn't just describe disasters; it offers a lot of common sense advice on how to avoid them. But to tell you the truth, just reading about what companies did and the consequences is incredibly valuable. If you work in high-tech or in marketing I can't see anyone not reading this book.
Rating:
Summary: Wickedly funny with lessons to learn...
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Humorous History of High-Tech Gaffes
Review: This book is designed to be the counterpart to the Tom Peters and Bob Waterman best seller since 1982, In Search of Excellence. I agree that it makes more sense to check out stupidity than excellence. Most people tell me that they learn more from seeing disasters than from reading about top performance. In addition, time has cast doubt on the wisdom of what those "excellent" companies did since so many of them have tanked since then. Why would anyone want to read about all of the stupid things that companies have done since the early 1980s to lose money, destroy customer relationships, go bankrupt and annoy everyone? Well, it should be because almost everyone makes a fatal error in a high tech company. Only Microsoft among the software companies has avoided that folly. Among PC companies, only Dell seems immune to date. Intel flirted with a fatal error when it tried to ignore its Pentium floating point problem. $500 million later, it was wiser. Another good reason for reading about them is that Mr. Chapman is a very funny writer. He makes the stories very entertaining. He also was present at some of the most inauspicious moments which gives the stories an extra verve that's irresistible. I especially enjoyed the afterword which explained in detail why it's always a stupid idea to rewrite working code from scratch to create the next release. I agree with the conclusion that tech companies need to be headed by people who understand the technical issues and the business challenges so they can make informed decisions about what to do next. I also suggest that investors read this book to get early warning signs of high tech meltdowns. Many people will be annoyed by this book because it suggests that Microsoft deserves its place in the software industry in part due to having avoided major errors and providing top-rated products. Naturally, there are still many stories of Microsoft's bullying tactics. So you'll still have a chance to be annoyed with Microsoft part of the time as you read the book. Mr. Chapman has such a talent for this work that I hope he will choose to apply it to politicians next. That could be really funny!
Rating: 
Summary: Entertaining and educational account of marketing mistakes
Review: 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. The author has been deeply involved for many years, and provides a great retrospective on a huge variety of events in both the near and further past. He shows that, if history doesn't repeat itself, its events at least follow similar patterns. The only thing it's missing is a more concrete analysis of the general marketing mistakes. I felt like he could've pulled out some more concrete tips for some of the mistakes to show how you can realize -- before you make the mistake -- that it's a bad idea. Though a lot of it seems obvious in retrospect, they must not have seemed like bad ideas at the time.
Rating:
Summary: Great, funny, and insightful
Review: One thing that impressed me about the book is how Chapman *doesn't* just hit easy targets or take cheap shots. He convincingly shows that the incidents of stupidity he describes were very much *avoidable*, made by people who really should've known better. The only minor complaint I have is with the interview in the appendix, which: 1. Only has a tangential relationship to the main part of the book, and is really about programming, and
2. Is really, really clueless *about* programming. There's probably 1/3 of a good point there (programmers are inherently drawn to recoding from the ground up, "Take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. That's the only way to be sure" solutions, so one should be skeptical), but stretched to a wildly dumb conclusion (rewriting code from the ground up is *never* justifiable!) They ignore a lot of obvious problems (e.g., the obvious fact that kludgy software is very difficult to maintain, and that multiple kludges interact with *each other* to exponentially increase bugginess.) In fact, one might almost call it... stupidity? :) But you can just skip the appendix, which is actually kinda nice just as a reminder that, yes, even really smart people like the author aren't completely immune to stupidity....
Rating:
Summary: If you don't know this, you WILL be in the next edition
Review: 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. and a temporary momentum that abruptly ended up sending everyone back down to reality. Geez, who'da guessed businesses without a tangible product couldn't survive? Go figure. Who even worries about using those stupid models now? But every student of business and business leader should learn from the obvious mistakes of others. The industry of subject in this book (IT) is still full plenty of people capable of making those mistakes. But the mentality is in every other industry as well and the lessons are applicable outside of IT and computers. A must read for every marketing major. I taught at university from the book as soon as I got it. Students sucked it up. This book gives you a great chance to learn and an enjoyable story to follow, too. BTW, I giggled when I read it. Get the book. now.
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