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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.
I turn to OSDN and the various /. editors for my management advice.......
CMDRTACO CHECK YOUR EMAIL!
In Search of Stupidity
Your search is over.
Trolling is a art,
The stupidest management/leadership advice book ever: Make It So, by Wess Roberts and Bill Ross.
And I say this as a Trek fan.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Find someone in your family that has management experience and is successful, and ask them for advice?
If you don't have anyone in your family that has successful management experience, then it's just not in your genes. Give up now.
evil adrian
Now where have we heard that before? At least these guys will be able to get a job in the Bush administration.
This is a great read:
THE BASIC LAWS OF HUMAN STUPIDITY by Carlo M. Cipolla
Excerpt:
"... human beings fall into four basic categories: the helpless, the intelligent, the bandit and the stupid."
See also:
True Stupidity
-kgj
-kgj
On the flip-side, there are quite a few IT professionals that get products completed inspite of the (non-technical) bosses who are only trying to further their own career. Loyalty works both ways. Why should I be loyal to a company that might lay me off next week and outsource the work I'm doing?
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.
Yes it is, and Apple did it. This is not a pro apple rant, but the 1.1 release of the Newton handwriting recognition system was lauded as "pretty good." That's something funny to say, but at the time no one came close to that level except for Palm. Palm has a handwriting recognition system that also works very well, except you simply have to write a certain way, and it doesn't recognize your specific style. Now we have the tablet PC from microsoft with handwriting software. Exactly what is so impossible about handwriting recognition?
I was a CIS major, and hell I didn't know handwriting recognition wasn't possible? I always thought the CIS majors were smarter, and now I have proof!
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
"No sense of loyalty or obligation to the ones who hired them in the first place."
After years of down-sizing and raided pension funds, many employees have learned their sense of coporate loyalty and obligation from the corporations themselves.
And I hardly see how this is a "blue-collar" experience.
...when this is free.
If you're happy and you know it read my blog
I've always wondered how DEC transformed itself from a great computer company (PDP-8, PDP-10, PDP-11, VAX, Alpha) to a historical footnote.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
ASPs (Application Service Companies)
Gee that's "ceculiar" acronym.
One who knows the enemy and knows himself will not be in danger in a hundred battles.
One who does not know the enemy but knows himself will sometimes win, sometimes lose.
One who does not know the enemy and does not know himself will be in danger in every battle.
Bush: He's Liberal in all the wrong ways.
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.
I dunno -- it's pretty much accepted among zealots that Apple management between Steve and Steve was disastrous. Most of us can't hear the word "ameliorate" without cringing.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
The easiest thing in the world is to look back and deride the losers while applauding the winners and point out why each is what it is. It's a little harder to pick them in advance.
What do you get out of reading this book? Unless it is some tools for making predictions, you might as well rip out the pages and wipe your ass with them.
As for Netscape vs. Microsoft, well, if you can't figure out why that happened (clue: it had nothing to do with Andreessen being an idiot or deserving to die), then you have no business attempting to analyze more subtle corporate interactions.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
are stupid people ever aware that they're behaving stupidly?
The answer is "usually not".
However, smart (not stupid) people may still benefit from the book. Even generally smart people occasionally behave in stupid ways. Also, something often intuitively appears stupid, but you can't quite say why. Essentially, it looks like an Anti-Patterns book for business.
Ultimately, the difference between smart and stupid is whether or not you make mistakes. It's whether or not you learn from your own mistakes - or better still from the mistakes of other.
The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits.
You can legislate morally you can't legislate morality
If CIS majors were smarter, you would have realized that what he meant was: "handwriting recognition that is good enough to be usable and not to piss many people off isn't possible for the reasonably forseeable future".
Well, DUH. What else did you expect in a "management bible"??
VeryGeekyBooks has more reviews of this book.
Why should I be loyal or obligated to someone who will fire my ass in a second, if the company's bottom line dictates it?
Think about it.
I have long since decided that my obligation is to my work only, i.e. that I will do my job and all of it the best I possibly can.
If a new employer comes along and decides to offer me better compensation or otherwise offer a better deal, I'm outta here just as fast as I would, if the company's quarterly earnings were dissapointing and they laid me off. At no circumstance will I EVER feel obligated to do anything just because someone has a fancier title than I do and is my boss.
That sort of stuff is for lambs.
I'm paid to do a job, nothing more or nothing less. That's where my obligation starts and ends.
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
I have now become the "stupid manager" of my small but growing business and I've realized that I just have to remember what my stupid bosses did over the years, and don't do what they did. Sounds easy, but it isn't. I just saw OfficeSpace again. I saw a little of myself. I was afraid.
Bosses like improvements. Radical change. Go faster, go faster. They tend to like this because that's how they got where they are -- right or wrong they tend to have hard driving personalities. Employees don't like constant change, in my opinion. No one likes coming to work and finding a new policy on their desk about their TPS report cover sheets. Change is useless much of the time.
I call this "overbehaviour." Doing something -- anything -- because it... just needs to be improved! Most improvements aren't.
So now that I'm the boss I'm trying to change as little as possible. Try and keep things in a rhythm and ask people to help come up with ideas. Not for internal processes, but for products. And then, give control of that idea to the guy who came up with it. It's his baby, let him nurture it. Let him take credit for it. People tend to live up or down to your expectations.
Use this to make the customer happier.
Ultimately, that's all that matters.
The baby's fine -- please stop sending business cards.
management consultants. Ever thought what management consultants do? I used to be one. They get paid good money to dress unpopular decisions up as the results of their 'independent studies'. What do they actually know about management? I graduated in history and started with a consultancy 2 years after graduating. There is never an industry as nepotistic and bent as management consultancy - that's how I got the job (through a friend).
My advice? Ask the oldest guy (or the person who's been there the longest) in your company what they did last time the same thing happened. They usually know, but you might not know that.
"It's not your information. It's information about you" - John Ford, Vice President, Equifax
I took a Management class in college where we spent a large amount of time focusing on some of the strategies successful companies used. It was all good at the time because the companies were pulling in massive amounts of customers and money. However several years after that class, these companies that were bragging about their innovative strategies were failing.
A few that I can remember was AOL and the Time Warner merger, Jack Welch and GE, and some others.
Just goes to show you, just because your successful in the short term with some crazy new strategy, doesn't mean it is a good one.
I used to be loyal to a fault. Then I noticed the corporations treat their employees like commodity regardless.
Was buddy-buddy with the bosses, too. I still am, whenever the boss is someone I would be friends with if he wasn't my boss, but I don't make the mistake of thinking that means anything in my professional life.
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
Hindsight is 20/20. If Marc Andreesen said the code sucked, and needed a rewrite, then it sucked and needed a rewrite. How long would it have taken to add all the latest features to the old code base?
Microsoft had the Mosaic code. They were not going to rewrite it, even though it sucked, because that would not be "good business". They sold the sucky product to win a short-term victory, and they're still doing it today.
Delivering good products should always be the goal. Given the choice between A) competing against Microsoft at repackaging bad code and B) rewriting the code completely, the choice is obvious.
Sposky and Chapman appear to believe that market domination defines correct decisionmaking. Criticize people for not understanding the business they're running, but don't criticize them for having integrity.
sigs, as if you care.
It exists. "The Concept of the Corporation", by Alfred P. Sloan. He put together General Motors.
Amazon Link
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
corporate loyalty requires trust on both sides.
the default 'trust' that employees have for employers is gone. Wildly growing management compensation vs the stagnation of working wages, raiding of benefits packages, downsizing, outsourcing, fly-by-night conversions of 401k shares into company shares... why again should the workforce trust the average company?
when a group of guys is doing unpaid overtime in serious crunch mode to ship software, only to be put on the street with no severance just after the code is turned in, 2 weeks before christmas, not in a noble attempt to save what part of a failing-company that they can, but rather to -maximize-profit-, all the while petitioning the board 'forgive' a multimillion dollar loan for a gulfstream... well, i don't exactly see where the employee is making a mistake by taking the realist viewpoint of 'i just work here'.
sure, the boss is not necessarily the root of all evil. but the employee is well served to assume that he is, until such a time as he has proof that he is not. and in our current employment situation, that just isn't happening by and large.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
Nothing wrong with that.
blowjobs from interns
Nothing wrong with that.
complete ignorance about foreign policy?
As opposed to the current president who has single-handedly alienated the rest of the world?
The owls are not what they seem
You don't need a book to tell you how to manage people well... It boils down to just a few simple points:
1) Break down the "big" tasks into personal-project-sized chunks. If a large number of underlings complain about the size of those chunks, adjust accordingly. If one or two people complain, tell them to quit whining.
2) Leave people alone to do their work. Realize that deadlines will occasionally slip, and some people will have bad weeks on occasion. If one or two people consistantly underperform, axe them. If everyone consistantly fails to do their work in time, the problem sits at your own desk.
3) Give people a reason to remain loyal and do their work. Money obviously forms the single biggest motivating factor, but pride in their work, credit for exceeding expectations, and comfort in their jobs matters quite a lot as well. If your best worker always comes in at noon and leaves at eight (at a 9-to-5 company), don't complain, but rather appreciate that someone knows when they do their best work. Same applies to attire - Unless your underlings deal directly with the public, every day should count as a dress-down day, within reason. PJ's obviously do not seem acceptible, but jeans and a T-shirt? A tie doesn't make people more productive, despite what management-types seem to believe. It just makes them uncomfortable.
Overall, I suppose I can sum this up in two abstractions - Treat people like you would like them to treat you (golden rule, basically); and, if everyone seems to complain about you, don't assume you have a lazy team, start looking at your own job performance.
This is one aspect of diversity that's often overlooked. As we try to ensure that departments and companies have a sprinkling of various races, genders, creeds, and personality types, one thing that's often overlooked is that not everyone within a group needs to be a "caffiene achiever." There are perfectly good workers who aren't interested in a promotion, but are happy doing what they're doing - very often, they're dependable and are worth their weight in gold in a pinch.
An example would be a night-shift computer operator. I had that position as a 23-year old, but moved up the first chance I got to the daytime shift, then programming, etc. For the department, the next couple years were a constant hassle of finding people to adequately fill the night shift - either they didn't stick around long, or (in one unfortunate case) were more interested in stealing laptops than actually working. Eventually, we found an older guy who was a few years away from retirement and was interested in steady work. He took the position, and has performed well in it for the last 5 years.
I guess the overall lesson is that customer satisfaction can often by strengthened by dependability, which can suffer when management is constantly reshuffling teams in search of marginal improvements.
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
Actually, after having worked for others, both good and bad, and myself (having employed others), I've come to the conclusion that it's often not a mistake to believe the boss is the root of all evil.
A good boss is one that knows what you're meant to be doing, and communicates it to you effectively, then lets you do what you're hired to do, and get on with it.
The unfortunately all too frequent boss is indeed one who knows the buzzwords (after all, that's how (s)he got hired). After that, it's all about making themself look good.
I worked in one place, where the manager (actually, tech director) produced a lovely little Gantt chart with all the work schedules I was meant to be doing for the next 60 days.
All with pretty, and short titles, so they looked neat on the side of the page.
Unfortunately, on asking what the first 5 days of work actually entailed, I got the answer that he didn't know (and he wrote the project plan!).
Same with the second and third 5 days.
It took me 4 days of running round the company, talking with anyone I could find, until I found anyone (one of the sales chaps that met with the clients on a particular meeting) that had any idea what it was meant to be.
Then, it turned out the estimate was wrong.
Every step of the way, all I got from the boss was 'You're meant to be at this point now, the chart says so..'.
However, having worked for a great boss, I know the other side of things also.
That chap used to have a project planner talk to us, explain how we should tailor our estimates by bringing up questions about how long debugging would take, talking to other people, unexpected errors that always creep up..
In the end, he got reasonable figures from us on how long it would really take.
Higher management often didn't like the figures, but he let it be known that they could have crap for less time, and probably end up with people leaving, and a working solution for the time given, and hold onto experienced employees.
He then left us to get on with work, while intercepting all attempts from above to poke and prod us at our desks, and otherwise get in the way.
He was good enough at the job to know we weren't slacking, and a good enough manager to know how to get the best out of people.
That, trust me, is a great rarity in the business world, where it's often believed that the numbers are what people adhere to, rather than people defining what the numbers should say.
When the numbers say what people should be doing, you give rise to books such as the headliner for this topic..
Most managers work for the better of the company and are burdened by workers who "just work there". No sense of loyalty or obligation to the ones who hired them in the first place.
Only an idiot, or someone completely ignorant of standard business practices over the last few decades, would blame lack of employee loyalty on the employees.
Here's a clue for you: Loyalty is earned. Companies that show loyalty to their employees have loyal employees. I think it's kind of funny when allegedly highly educated MBAs can't understand that basic relationship.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Your statement is incorrect, and frankly so is the statement made by the author of the book.
There are tons of examples of decent handwriting recognition. This was an attempt by the author of the book to sound clever and funny while pointing out Sculley as a bad CEO (and to the trained eye, it was a failed attempt). Sculley WAS as bad CEO, but that was simply because he had no understanding of technology over all. To a businessman, nothing is impossible, but a good technology CEO knows the limits of what can technology can provide vs how much money can be spent.
If you frame the statement correctly you are right. For example you can't make a handwriting recognition system that's not based on a fully sentient AI that could recognize any one person's distinct handwriting and translate it into digital characters. But you can make perfectly acceptable systems, depending on who you are making it for, that is effectively handwriting writing recognition.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
> According to Rick Chapman, the answer is
> simpler:
> Microsoft was the only company on the list that
> never made a fatal, stupid mistake. Whether this
> was by dint of superior brainpower or just dumb
> luck, the biggest mistake Microsoft made was the
> dancing paperclip. And how bad was that, really?
Microsoft's past is littered with failures: Microsoft Bob, early versions of Windows, early versions of PocketPC, all versions of Smartphone so far, the original MSN "Blackbird", LAN Manager, UltimateTV, Windows At Work, Windows DNA, and huge internal projects like Pyramid and Cairo that never even saw the light of day --- these are just some of the examples.
None of these mistakes were fatal simply because Microsoft could always fall back on the revenues of their OS monopoly, and later Office monopoly.
It gets my goat when people point to companies like Netscape and say "they deserved to be crushed by Microsoft, because they made mistakes". Everybody makes mistakes. The difference is that the monopolist gets a lot more lives.
Ditto for Intel. What other company could have survived the IA64 debacle? Yet Intel has, on the back of its x86 near-monopoly.
Thanks for the link! I told a lot of my friends about that story right after it came out, & now I can show it to them. I'm surprised I hadn't found a link to it before, because I'm pretty good at searching the Internet, if I might say so myself.
If it weren't for Apple, who would Microsoft steal user interface ideas from?
No electrons were harmed creating this post, though some may have been subjected to electrical and/or magnetic fields.
I read this book... don't waste your time if you are remotely familiar with computer and tech history.
"Ain't I a stinka..." - Bugs
Machiavelli was pulling half of it out of his arse. The problem with the Prince ...
Well, the 'Prince' only represents part of Machiavelli's output on the subject of government (read management), and IMO he's much underrated by treating him only as author of the 'Prince'. In the 'Discourses' he gives dispassionate analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of different types of government/management -- especially the ways in which each type tends to decay -- a close point of contact with the current topic -- and also he makes it clear that princes/autocrats are not his preferred style anyway.
In other words, is it useful either to pick out really smart things companies have done, or really dumb things companies have done, and say "Do this, and you'll succeed; do that, and you'll fail"?
The core assumption made by the student of history is that tomorrow will be like yesterday. The core assumption made by readers of business books like In Search of Excellence is that my company is like their company. Too bad these assumptions are so often wrong.
They say that those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it because the blindly repeat the failures) But it is also true that those who do learn from history are doomed to repeat it because they blindly repeat the successes. The point is that context is important and context is different in different companies and in different times.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Handwriting recognition, or understanding strokes, is a difficult but nowhere near impossible problem. A 1991 Siggraph paper "Specifying Gestures by Exampe" by Rubine listed the 13 'features' used by most recognizers today. That is, 13 numbers derived from the actual pen stroke, although only a few of them are really needed. I've written my own using only 9 of those features, and using the Graffiti symbols (Palm's alphabet) have very good accuracy.
Other 'handwriting' such as marking menus or gesture-based commands (see /. headline earlier today about some) can be and are easily implemented using a few features from the Rubine feature set (angle, curvature, relative size based on the entire drawing, etc.)
So 'handwriting recognition' depends on your definition. Recognizing a set of specific, carefully crafted symbols as they are written can be done with very high accuracy. Recognizing the same symbols after drawing can be done, but its currently a little more difficult. Recognizing anybody's handwriting, including awful scribbles, at any point in the alphabet's history, is probably computationally impossible.
Two examples:
Example with 'bad handwriting' Draw an 'A', with three strokes, but don't connect the top peak: it could be an 'A' or it could be 'H'. Increasingly advanced recognizers are also looking at the context, since "T?E" and "H?T" are most likely to be 'H' and 'E' respectively. Palm (specifically the Graffiti alphabet) resolves this by making the symbols un-ambiguous. Sufficiently bad handwriting and poor grammar (ie: hasty lecture notes) will always cause problems.
Example with old script I've carefully examined documents ranging from the present day to copies of nearly 500-year-old script. Most old papers I've looked at, up until this century, had more curves and sharper corners. In the 1700's and 1800's, many people had fancy serifs, with especially practiced serifs on their names (like a spiral before starting an F or B, only one swirl on content, but 5 swirls on their signature). In the beginning of this centry, my own collection moves from spirals to sharp angles, then moves toward big curves+corners. I personally enjoy looking at the serifs on 'A' and 'F' from people who learned to write in the WWI time frame, especially the people who seemed to compose letters from connected sharp-cornered triangles and curves. Today's 'good' handwriting more closely mirrors what we expect to see in a sans-serif font, with exceptions on a few letters (F, D, B, q).
I am already seeing people draw 'E' as they would in Graffiti (two curls) rather than the traditional form of lines and angles. Personally, I don't see it taking too many more decades before our handwriting starts to evolve to a more recogniser-friendly style.
frob
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
Want to know how management is damaging your brain ? Here's the quick proof :
I call this "overbehaviour." Doing something --anything -- because it... just needs to be improved! Most improvements aren't.
Signs that you're a manager: inventing words like "overbehaviour" when "stupidity" word already exists and is well understood.
Sorry pal, I'll look for you in Office Space 2