Programmer Musings

Review of In Search of Stupidity, Second Edition

In Search of Stupidity, Second Edition
Merrill R. Chapman
Apress, 2006

This book aims to explain many marketing disasters in the computer software and hardware industries. Chapman covers marketing mistakes of both hardware and software companies. Some of these stories provide insight into the thinking behind the mistake. As an insider at MicroPro, Chapman could give a lot of detail about the death of WordStar. In many cases, he explains the reason a particular decision is bad from a marketing point of view.

Unfortunately, Chapman does run into problems with his explanations at times. He explains that positioning WordStar 2000 in a way that competed with WordStar caused major confusion for MicroPro's customers leading to the downfall of the company. He then goes on to explain how Microsoft made the same mistake when they released Windows NT, but it was apparently not a big issue in that case. Part of the book's premise seems to be that if you can just avoid making the mistakes in this book, your company will be successful. However, if the a decision for one company is fatal, and the same decision is a minor inconvenience for another, learning from these mistakes is made much harder.

Chapman explains repeatedly how misunderstanding their customers' needs causes more than one company to run itself into the ground. His description of the mistakes during the dot-com era were mostly familiar. Many of these stories are interesting in the same way that watching a disaster movie is interesting.

My biggest complaint with the book is its biases. Based on the stories in the book, Microsoft got lucky in the beginning and through a combination of great technology and luck became the giant it is today. He discusses the extensive PR campaign that Microsoft used to build Bill Gate's public image and how the company tied its image to that of Bill Gates.

Unfortunately, the book ignores some of Microsoft's flaws in the interest of providing a good story. In the chapter on Borland, the book states that Borland made it into the big league with its purchase of Paradox. If Chapman is to be believed, everything that Borland did before that point was minor and the debacle surrounding Paradox and dBase destroyed the company. What he doesn't cover is how Microsoft nearly lost the programming language market to Borland in the late 80s and early 90s. Borland's Turbo Pascal basically destroyed the market for Microsoft Pascal. Turbo C and Turbo C++ were taking market share away from Microsoft C.

The funny thing is that Microsoft was ignoring Borland during this time. When the news came out that a survey had found that Borland owned 65% of the PC languages market, Microsoft suddenly woke up. The details of how they dealt with Borland are described elsewhere. Interestingly, this story would not have fit the theme of the book. I don't know if it was left out for that reason or if it was because Chapman was unaware of it.

The strong pro-Microsoft bias runs through the middle third of the book. Basically, the book makes it sound as if Microsoft can do no wrong and everyone who has ever competed with them was staffed by idiots. A particularly interesting example was the browser wars. According to Chapman, Netscape made some really stupid marketing decisions that threw away their market advantage. When Microsoft finally weighed in with their browser, they chased Netscape out of the market with their superior technology.

This is a particularly interesting rewrite of history. No mention was made of Spyglass Software, the company that Microsoft bought Internet Explorer from. There's also no mention of the fact that IE only started to gain market share when it was bundled with every copy of Windows.

In all fairness, Chapman does have many complaints about Microsoft's new Activation Code scheme. Once again, Microsoft is proving what we learned about copy protection in the 80s; copy protection only makes life more difficult for your paying customers.

I also don't understand the 6-page interview of Joel Spolsky at the end of the book. Chapman doesn't interview anyone else in the book. The interview seems to serve as a forum for Spolsky to air some of his favorite peeves, but it doesn't seem to really support the book's premise. Although I often find Spolsky's comments interesting, I'm not sure what they were doing in this book.

On a final note, I also did a review of this book on Amazon and was surprised to find that Chapman had also reviewed his own book. More interestingly, his review was a heated rebuttal of another review. I'm afraid that this action hurts the author's credibility (at least in my eyes). Even if the reviewer had made false claims about the book (which he did not appear to have done), there is really no excuse for using another book review to respond (while giving his own book 5 stars).

All in all, I thought this was an interesting book. If you are interested in some of the mistakes that large companies can make, this book is an okay read. Remember to take the stories with a large grain of salt. If you are a Microsoft fan, you'll probably like the direction of the book. If you are not a Microsoft fan, some of the chapters may be harder to swallow.