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July 26, 2005
In Search of Stupidity
I'm not sure how I missed In Search of Stupidity: Over 20 Years of High-Tech Marketing Disasters when it was first released, but a friend and colleague loaned me a copy and I read it over the last few days.
It was a well written retelling of the evolution of the PC hardware and software industries from the early 80's to the rise of Dell and Microsoft as the dominant powers in their respective niches in the early 00's.
In hindsight, it's easy to pick out the key ill-conceived strategic decisions. The author, who laces the text with personal anecdotes from his time as field engineer and product manager for such one-time luminaries as Ashton-Tate (dBase) and MicroPro (WordStar), often stops frustratingly short of drawing lessons from these decisions, or convincing the reader that the consequences of the decision were even remotely obvious at the time.
None the less, it was a good read, and has some insightful gems about how to lose control of the hardware market you birthed (IBM), drive a productive software business into the ground by ignoring your users clamoring for a GUI (Novell), and get yourself squashed into oblivion by bating the 800lb gorilla of the software world (Netscape).
Well worth the time to read it.
Posted by dberger at July 26, 2005 8:07 AM