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In Search of Stupidity: Over 20 Years of High-Tech Marketing Disasters
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Author: Merrill R. (Rick) Chapman, Merrill R. Chapman
List Price: $24.99
Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price
ISBN: 1590591046
Publisher: APress (01 January, 1970)
Edition: Hardcover
Sales Rank: 8,723
Average Customer Rating: 4.11 out of 5
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Customer ReviewsRating: 5 out of 5
Delightful chronicle of hi-tech industry
This is one of the best books I've read about what's gone wrong with the high-tech industry. Chapman has the answers, told through stories that are witty, and yet provide useful lessons for software and tech company owners, marketers, and sales execs who want to succeed today.
Rating: 5 out of 5
ROI
One of the most enjoyable books I have read regarding the business of high tech. Reading some of the previous reviews, I guess not everyone agrees. I personally loved the author's sense of humour, which makes for a very enjoyable read. Those who criticize the lack of 'dot.com' material, or doubt that 20 years old events are today irrelevant, miss an important point: those who forget -or ignore- history are condemned to repeat it.Besides, learning from mistakes through some other poor guy's skin has some of the better ROI I know. And told with such a witty irreverent sense of humour is just plain fun. I would warmly recommend this book. Excellent read.
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.
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