Slashdot Mirror
In Search of Stupidity
Rick Chapman, on the back of the dustcover, features an impressive resume of MicroPro, Ashton-Tate, IBM, Inso, Microsoft, Novell, DataEase, Stromberg, Sun Microsystems, Teradata and Ziff-Davis. For those who just recently caught up to speed with the computer industry, some names might sound unfamiliar. Indeed, a great many tech companies were driven into the ground either by poor management practice or poor product planning.
About the book
The author explores the stories of Digital Research, MicroPro, Ashton-Tate, Borland, Motorola, Novell, Netscape and a slew of ASPs (Application Service Companies), as well as dot-coms, to derive lessons on mismanagement. Chapman also talks about current behemoths, IBM, Intel and Microsoft, telling stories of numerous product failures and the ways the companies have managed to deal with each blow. Apple Computer is also mentioned, but don't forward a copy of the title to your local friendly Mac zealot -- contemplating Apple's current market share and influence on the market (with some speculations on what could have been done), Chapman calls Apple the world's largest irrelevant company.
Want to learn secret skills of ruining a perfectly good product line? How about being a great company for thousands of developers and then pissing off almost 100 percent of them? Want to get a clear roadway on publishing two parallel software products that compete with one another, while even the sales people are unable to clarify the differences? In Search of Stupidity takes the reader on the joyous ride, following closely the growth and downfall of technological giants.
Developers! Developers! Developers!
Famous Joel Spolsky provided a preface for Chapman's title, where he provided some interesting statistics about world's largest consumer software companies as well as thoughts on the issue of who runs the company better -- programmers or business majors? "When Pepsi-pusher John Sculley was developing the Apple Newton, he didn't know something that every computer science major in the country knows: handwriting recognition is not possible. This was at the same time that Bill Gates was hauling programmers into meetings begging them to create a single rich text edit control that could be reused in all their products," writes Spolsky, implying that people who run software or hardware companies better have some knowledge about their business.
Chapman's critique of that preface runs throughout the book -- the famous setback that can be expected from the developer's community is the notion that the code should be re-written for the new version, as the old one simply is too buggy and it's easier to start anew.
What's good about the book
In the introduction chapter Chapman provides a great overview of what to expect in the book. His style is lively, full of analogies and old tales. The book is marked by a good sense of humor, without actually going into jokes (except for occasional re-telling of Intel Pentium FPU-related humor). All the companies who were not big enough to deserve a separate chapter but still stupid enough to be in the book are mentioned in introduction. Street Technologies, who in an advertising brochure bravely claimed the owner of its software could "eliminate half of the work force," and whose literature probably never made it through the mail room. Syncronys, who sold the SoftRAM product, which promised to "double your computer memory," except for the fact it didn't actually do it. Project Iridium from Motorola, which burned through $5 billion before figuring out that market for thousand-dollar phones and hundred-dollar service charges was a bit limited.
The table of contents can be found on the book Web site, and from the subchapter names like "The Great Pentium Bunny Roast" one can deduct that the book is full of good humor mixed with sarcasm. Sometimes Chapman is merciless when mentioning some of his stories' subjects. Here's his introduction to a chapter on Netscape vs. Microsoft battle:
If you like the horror movies, you know the cast usually sports a character you've come to think of as The Idiot Who Deserves to Die. He's the knucklehead who runs screaming into the path of Godzilla just as the giant reptile is heading out to spend a relaxing afternoon destroying Tokyo, and gets squashed like a bug. The dimwit who sticks his noggin out of the deserted cabin in the woods and yells out "Mad slasher? What mad slasher?" just before the mad slasher decapitates him. The space-bound fumble-fingers who always manages to drop his blaster right when the Tentacle of Doom is zeroing it on him for lunch. If Marc Andreessen, co-founder of one-time wonder company Netscape, ever gives up high tech for a career in horror movies, he'll play that character.The author does provide a pretty good collection of facts on just what Netscape has done wrong, and how Microsoft's onslaught could have been avoided, so the quoted paragraph is not just an attempt to personally insult Andreessen. Here's a story of Ashton-Tate and its leader Ed Esber, who eventually ruined the company:
Esber did fancy himself something of a business guru, and one of his favorite quotes was "A computer will not make a good manager out of a bad manager. It makes a good manager faster and a bad manager worse faster." He had something there. It had taken George Tate about 5 years to build Ashton-Tate to software giant status; it would take Ed Esber only 2.5 years to put the company on the road to ruin. And Esber had a PC on his desk the entire time.
Debunking the myths
Besides providing a lot of good stories from the history, Chapman also tries to dispell some myths about the industry. Most of the myths somehow involve Microsoft, which is hardly surprising, provided Chapman dedicated more attention to software companies than hardware companies. He describes the attitude towards the company in the early stages of the industry development, points out why ISVs flocked towards DOS/Windows instead of more stable OS/2, and denies the common belief that Bill Gates' project owes most of its success to the deal with IBM to put DOS on the PC.
Chapman also analyzes the mistakes made, and shows how Apple Computer could've been the 99% market share vendor right now, but a few stupid mistakes in the company's past allowed for better short-term gains while leading the company into oblivion. In the last chapter, the demise of dot-coms and application service providers is told in a sort of haphazard way, without going into details of any specific company. Chapman keeps his sense of humor and is not so full of sarcasm and "I told you so" attitude as Philip Kaplan's F'd Companies .
Overall
The book is an enjoyable read, and with roughly 250 pages of interesting and fact-packed text makes an informative one, too. Even if you have been in the industry long enough to know better about the mistakes Chapman names, the book is worth reading just to re-fresh the past memories and learn some juicy details about the companies' internals (Chapman personally worked in MicroPro's WordStar team and at Ashton-Tate, among others). For others, it's a great learn to take a look at serious and less-serious screw-ups by major technological companies.
Each chapter is preceded by a caricature. The chapter on MicroPro shows WordStar and WordStar 2000 pointing a gun to one another's head with an apparent attempt to pull the trigger. The chapter on OS/2 (titled The Idiot Piper) shows that very idiot piper playing apparently a tune of OS/2, while the products designed for the operating system are heading off the cliff. Chapter on Intel's Pentium flop features bunny suits dancing around the barbecue fire with equations like "9/3 = 2.999" on their aprons.
In Search of Stupidity is an excellent source of information, analysis and good laughs. It's one of the few industry titles that will give you a large supply of stories to re-tell to other developers over a beer. Chapman's book is also an excellent case study collection of anti-management rules that one should avoid when running a high tech company.
You can purchase In Search of Stupidity from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
VeryGeekyBooks has more reviews of this book.
However, Art of War actually addresses this - talks about how one shouldn't wage war on anyone you don't NEED to, and how the costs and problems with managing an empire go up pretty much exponentially, the more territory you control. The conclusion is don't go to war unless you have a really good reason, and peaceably coexist if it's possible.
So in that sense, it still holds true economically - any monopoly will eventually crumble into ruin under its own weight, but only after causing great destruction. Same as empires.
Bush: He's Liberal in all the wrong ways.
Back in the 1970's, a bunch of guys at Rand implemented a very successful handwriting input package. It even included an editor that used a lot of the standard editor's marks to make changes.
They commented that there was a serious misunderstanding of the difficulty of handwriting recognition: If you want the computer to take a page of handwriting and recognize everything on it, that is nearly impossible. But if the computer can follow the handwriting as it is written, the job is fairly easy.
They also made the point that their software was typically only around 90% accurate (counting characters) when a person started using it. But it improved quickly. This wasn't because the software learned your writing; it didn't. It was because, when it drew the wrong character, you did it over until the software got it right. This trained the person to write in a way that the software could recognize. One side effect was that users of their system had noticably better handwriting after a few days.
But reading a sheet full of handwriting is still a very difficult task for a computer. Is there any software that does it well enough that you don't have to edit the results?
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
It exists. "The Concept of the Corporation", by Alfred P. Sloan. He put together General Motors.
I owned two Newtons, and my handwriting is atrocious. The 1.1 OS recognized my printing extremely well, however, with a much better success record than Graffiti.
It should also be noted that Graffiti existed on the Newton before there was a Palm. It's just that the Newton's Graffiti window was software, rather than reserving a huge portion of potential screen space for a fixed Graffiti window. I'm not saying that was a bad idea, but it was a difference since the Palm had Graffiti in mind when they made it.
The only real reasons that the Palm succeeded where the Newton failed were the size of the Palm vs. the Newton and because you could program the Palm in C rather than the (custom, but super-cool) Newtonscript. Oh, and the whole Windows compatibility thing, I suppose. I forget if Newton had any Windows software, though I tend to doubt it. Never had a reason to check it out, though.
=Brian
There is nothing so good that someone, somewhere, will not hate it.
They sold the sucky product to win a short-term victory, and they're still doing it today.
Somebody marked this as Insightful? Microsoft won the war. Utterly. How long would it have taken to use the old code base? Less time that to code the new features and write everything else from scratch. Guaranteed.
Integrity? How much integrity does Netscape have? None because they're gone.
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
Ugh, go crawl in a hole and die, you pathetic idiot.
"Plus it was written at a time that "democracy" was pretty much unheard of"
Machiavelli was a strong believer in the superiority of the republic over other forms of government. You know "republic"? It means the same thing that we say "democracy" to mean.
"I mean, this is the book that says it's better for a leader to be feared... and by extension, hated"
"Still, a prince should make himself feared in such a way that if he does not gain love, he at any rate avoids hatred; for fear and the absence of hatred may well go together, and will be always attained by one who abstains from interfering with the property of his citizens and subjects or with their women."
-Machiavelli (The Prince)
Worthless pseudointellectuals like yourself are a plague on humanity.
READ BEFORE CRITICIZING
Ah, but it also says that leaders should be feared but *respected*. Machiavelli strongly recommends against being hated. He says that's the worst thing that can happen to a leader. Are you sure you've read it?
And what could be more "Machiavellian" than putting pretenses of being nice to your employees to keep them from doing mass walkouts?