In Search of Stupidity: Over 20 Years of High-Tech Marketing Disasters
Author: Merrill R. (Rick) Chapman, Merrill R. Chapman
List Price: $24.99
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ISBN: 1590591046
Publisher: APress (09 July, 2003)
Sales Rank: 11,986
Average Customer Rating: 4.13 out of 5
Customer Reviews
Rating: 5 out of 5
Best Business Book Ever Written
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: 5 out of 5
A Rorschach Test for Your Company and the Industry
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: 5 out of 5
You could not make this stuff up...
Chapman offers a caustic and often hilarious first-person Silicon Valley memoir with a biased point of view: stupid is as stupid does. Folks who weren't there (I was) may not believe the monumental egos, internal power struggles, organizational tunnel vision, towering communications failures and blockheaded marketing miscalculations. Sadly, these tales are not apocryphal. If you're looking for a scholarly history of the development of the personal computer, you'll be disappointed because the development of the personal computer market was hardly a scholarly exercise. But if you're in search of a bare-knuckled commentary written in a "tell-it-like-it-was" style that will often leave you laughing, you'll really enjoy this read. Lots of lessons to be learned here for both marketing types and senior management. Similar Products
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