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In Search Of Stupidity by Merril R. Chapman

Monday, 08 December 2003

The title of this book was inspired by In Search Of Excellence by eighties management guru Tom Peters. In Search Of Stupidity is an amusing chronicle of over two decades of marketing mistakes from the likes of IBM, Apple, MicroPro, Borland and others. The book tells the story behind disasters such as IBM's PC Junior, an expensive, ugly and underpowered version of the PC for the home market that had the code name “Peanut”. Or the product positioning dilemma that MicroPro found themselves in when due to gross ineptness in the product planning department, their own WordPro and WordStar 2000 word processors were competing against each other. An episode that killed the company.

In Search Of Stupidity is made all the more interesting because the author had first-hand experience of many of the companies that he writes about, having worked for MicroPro, Ashton-Tate, IBM, Novell and others. Many of the stories are underlined with anecdotes in the footnotes.

I found that the book lost a bit of momentum during the last chapter, which was about the dot com boom and application service providers. Or maybe that just reflects the fact that I don't find those topics as interesting as reading about how (for example) Paramount refused to let IBM use a Star Trek theme for marketing their OS/2 Warp operating system, leaving Big Blue with no choice but to adopt a rather strange slant for the campaign!

If there's a consistent theme throughout all these tales of corporate craziness, it's this: a key factor in Microsoft being in the position they are in today is the fact that on the whole they haven't made the stupid mistakes that their competitors have. I once read a quote that said Microsoft aren't the largest fish in the ocean, they are the ocean.

As a bonus there's a foreword by Joel Spolsky and also a reprint of an online interview with Joel at the end in which he talks about stupid development tricks, such as throwing all your code away and rewriting your product from scratch, thus chucking out all the accumulated experience that has ended up in the code. The book is rounded off nicely with a tongue–in–cheek glossary. An easy and enlightening read, with a sequel planned and eagerly awaited. 5/5.

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