In Search of Stupidity: Over Twenty Years of High Tech Marketing...

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 408 pages
• Published by: Apress
• Edition: 2nd Edition September 28, 2006
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 1590597214
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-1590597217
• Book Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 1.1 inches
• Weighs: 1.2 pounds

Product Description


In Search of Stupidity: Over Twenty Years of High-Tech Marketing Disasters, Second Edition is National Lampoon meets Peter Drucker. It's a funny and well-written business book that takes a look at some of the most influential marketing and business philosophies of the last twenty years. Through the dark glass of hindsight, it provides an educational and entertaining look at why these philosophies didn't work for many of the country's largest and best-known high-tech companies.

Marketing wizard Richard Chapman takes you on a hilarious ride in this book, which is richly illustrated with cartoons and reproductions of many of the actual campaigns used at the time. Filled with personal anecdotes spanning Chapman's remarkable career (he was present at many now-famous meetings and events), In Search of Stupidity, Second Edition looks at the best of the worst marketing ideas and business decisions in the last twenty years of the technology industry.

The second edition includes new chapters on Google and on how to avoid stupidity, plus the extensive analyses of all chapters from the first edition. Youll want to get a copy because it

• Features an interesting preface and interview with Joel Spolsky of "Joel on Software"
• Offers practical advice on avoiding PR disaster
• Features actual pictures of some of the worst PR and marketing material ever created
• Is highly readable and funny
• Includes theme-based cartoons for every chapter

About The Author
Merrill R. (Rick) Chapman is the author of the first edition of this book. He has worked in the software industry since 1978 as a programmer, salesman, support representative, senior marketing manager, and consultant for many different companies, including WordStar (really MicroPro, but no one remembers the name of the company), Ashton-Tate, IBM, Inso, Novell, Bentley Systems, Berlitz, Hewlett-Packard, and Ziff-Davis. His first computer was a Trash One (you antiques out there know what that is), and he began his career writing software inventory management systems for beer and soda distributors in New York City. He is the author of The Product Marketing Handbook for Software, coauthor of the software Industry and Information Association's US software Channel Marketing and Distribution Guide, and periodically writes articles about software and high-tech marketing for a variety of publications.

Reader Reviews
This review is from: In Search of Stupidity: Over twenty Years of High-Tech Marketing Disasters (Hardcover) -- unfortunately. This is an enjoyable, amusing, and easily digestible account of some of the multi-billion dollar horrors of the PC age. It's written in a very readable style by one of the guys who lived through a lot of it. He's not afraid to name names, and not (much) ashamed to admit that he was in the thick of some bad ones. Long before the dot-bomb collapse around 2000, companies in the PC world had been shooting themselves in the foot, making (and repeating) insanely bad decisions, and doing everything they could to drive themselves into the ground. Many succeeded in killing themselves off, others (like IBM and Apple) did not. The recurring themes sound simply ridiculous, unless you live in this high-tech world. They they sound ridiculously familiar. They include: * Expensive acquisitions of companies with nothing to offer, * Demolition ("rewriting") of bread-and-butter products, * Selling two, three, or more products that all do the same thing, * Annoying and ignoring the customers until they all wander away, and * Whatever it was, doing it again and again. This mostly has an anecdotal, non-academic style, so it's an easy and enjoyable read. The dark side of that force is that Chapman isn't always strong on constructive suggestions or on the details of the analysis. Sometimes, though, it would have been psychoanalysis - personalities brash and aggressive when there wasn't that much to be brash about. Chapman covers only the PC side of the world, so he missed some good ones. There was Apollo Computer, for example, and their steadfast determination to avoid advertising their strengths. Still, he gives plenty of cases, and gives good documentary support from the newsrags of the times. I could have asked for a few more pointers on ways out of the stupidity trap. Simply seeing the examples is useful, though, and gives hope that readers will at least make different mistakes than the ones shown here. //wiredweird