In Search of Stupidity

In 1982 Tom Peters and Robert Waterman kicked off the modern business-book era with In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America's Best-Run Companies. The book was a runaway best-seller, and soon authors from all corners of business life were exhorting companies and the people who worked in those companies to get out there and be excellent, control chaos, worship wow, and grasp greatness. Unfortunately, as time went by it became painfully obvious that many of the companies Peters and Waterman had profiled, particularly the high-tech ones, were something less than excellent. Firms such as Atari, Data General, DEC, IBM, Lanier, NCR, Wang, Xerox, and others either crashed and burned or underwent painful and wrenching traumas you would have expected excellent companies to avoid. What went wrong?

Merrill R. (Rick) Chapman thinks he has an answer. He believes that high-tech companies periodically melt down because they fail to learn from the lessons of the past and thus make the same completely avoidable mistakes again and again and again. In Search of Stupidity: Over 20 Years of High-Tech Marketing Disasters chronicles high-tech stupidity from the past to the present so that we can all move on to create new and unique catastrophes of our very own in the future.

You will weep (or perhaps laugh, if you are so inclined) as you examine exhibits of some of the worst high-tech marketing collateral and programs ever created. And you will experience much, much more. Yet while all this is taking place, you won't have to listen to Celine Dion sing that song even once.

Incisive, witty, packed with detail and information, yet very funny, In Search of Stupidity: Over 20 Years of High-Tech Marketing Disasters is an indispensable book for anyone who wishes to understand what companies do to fail., who wants to know what they can do to avoid making yesterday's mistakes yet again, and who desperately desires to never see their company profiled in a sequel.

• one: Introduction
• two: First Movers, First Mistakes:
  IBM, Digital Research, Apple, and Microsoft
• three: A Rather Nutty Tales:
  IBM and the PC Junior
• four: Positioning Puzzlers:
  MicroPro and Microsoft
• five: We Hate You, We Really Really Hate You:
  Ed Esber and Ashton-Tate
• six: The Idiot Piper:
  OS/2 and IBM
• seven: Frenchman Eats Frog, Chokes to Death:
  Borland and Philippe Kahn
• eight: Brands for the Burning:
  Intel and Motorola
• nine: From Godzilla to Gecko:
  The Long Slow Decline of Novell
• ten: Ripping PR Yarns:
  Microsoft and Netscape
• eleven: Purple Haze All Through My Brain:
  The Internet and ASP Busts
• Afterword: Stupid Development Tricks

An extremely funny book, and so very true. Read and enjoy.