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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,
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.
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?
"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.
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.
DEC was like Data General and every other mini-computer maker. They thought they had eliminated, or were eliminating, all rationale for mainframe computers. What they really had done was point out the path for computers cheap enough for small groups who couldn't afford big computers, and couldn't get any satisfaction from the corporate mainframe computer center. The PC was just an extension of this decentralization. But these minicomputer makers were too arrogant to understand that, and laughed at PCs as being useless. They didn't realize that just as small departments might want their own computers, so might individuals.
Infuriate left and right
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.
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.
> 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.