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Businesses Books Media It's funny. Laugh. Book Reviews

In Search of Stupidity 282

Posted by timothy from the don't-look-far dept.
Alex Moskalyuk writes "There are dozens of titles on 'corporate excellence.' Management types like them. They teach the best practices from known companies and let you know how ABC Inc. or XYZ Corp. became such a glorious business as it is. In Search of Excellence (ISBN: 0446385077) is one of them, deserving the title of 'management bible' from its publishers. Apart from the minor detail that some of the data in the book was faked. At times like these, where do you turn for a good management advice?" Read on for Alex's review of an alternative text, Merrill R. Chapman's In Search of Stupidity.
In Search of Stupidity: Over 20 Years of High-Tech Marketing Disasters
author Merrill R. Chapman
pages 256
publisher APress
rating 10
reviewer Alex Moskalyuk
ISBN 1590591046
summary Over 20 Years of High-Tech Marketing Disasters

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.
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In Search of Stupidity More

In Search of Stupidity

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  • Good management advice (Score:5, Funny)

    by scumbucket ( 680352 ) on Friday November 21, 2003 @02:01PM (#7530609)
    I turn to OSDN and the various /. editors for my management advice.......

  • Found it. (Score:5, Funny)

    by grub ( 11606 ) <slashdot@grub.net> on Friday November 21, 2003 @02:01PM (#7530616) Homepage Journal

    In Search of Stupidity

    Your search is over [sco.com].

  • Stupidest Management Advice Book Ever (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ewhac ( 5844 ) on Friday November 21, 2003 @02:04PM (#7530647) Homepage Journal

    The stupidest management/leadership advice book ever: Make It So [amazon.com], by Wess Roberts and Bill Ross.

    And I say this as a Trek fan.

    Schwab

    • "If you want to run a successful company, you gotta cook the books!"

      With statements from former Enron execs, who also go over the benefits of plausible deniability, and Ken Lay who gives advice on stashing your ill-gotten booty in variable annuities and bribing the sons of presidents.

  • Why not (Score:5, Funny)

    by Evil Adrian ( 253301 ) on Friday November 21, 2003 @02:04PM (#7530654) Homepage
    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.
    • And if you DO have somebody who says they have a successful management experience in your family, give it up anyway because its only an evil lie of upper management.


    • > 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.

      We were talking about ordinary businesses, not the Mafia.

    • Re:Why not (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Malcontent ( 40834 )
      The problem is that there is no right answer. A commonly used analogy is this.

      Let's have 100 people flip a coin. If your coin ends up heads take a step forward, if it turns up tails take a step back. After a thouand flips can the guy that's in first place honestly say he was successful because he flipped good?

      Every day people make a thousand decisions based on the information they have at the time. In retrospect some of those decisions turned out to be bad but at the time there was probably a perfectly go
  • ... is this book any more useful as a textbook for businesses than rah-rah stuff like In Search of Excellence? 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"?

    I'm not sure it is. Certainly the lessons of history are just as important in business as in any other field of endeavor. But a listing of successes and failures -- both, inevitably, filtered through t

    • Re:The question is ... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by borkus ( 179118 ) on Friday November 21, 2003 @02:21PM (#7530826) Homepage
      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.
      • There's some information about that lack of feedback; a so called "stupid people don't know they're stupid" syndrome.

        Seems like the very mechanism we use to "do something" is the same mechanism we use to "evaluate how well we do something."

        So, if you're no good at running a business, you have no idea how to get better because (put simply) you already think you're doing a great job. Otherwise, you would have corrected the problem to begin with!

        There's a better description of it here [apa.org]
        • 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.
    • One of my all time favorite books on software engineering is titled 'antipatterns', it literally contains dozens of examples of what NOT to do in writing software.

      This book, in combination with books that describe best practices (Design Patterns springs to mind) has made me a better engineer by giving me perspective on both sides of the fence. I don't see why this would be any different. Experience (both good and bad) is vital to success in almost any profession. Books like this allow managers to gain expe
    • 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 hist

  • Basic Laws of Human Stupidity (Score:3, Offtopic)

    by handy_vandal ( 606174 ) on Friday November 21, 2003 @02:08PM (#7530692) Homepage Journal
    This is a great read:

    THE BASIC LAWS OF HUMAN STUPIDITY [truestupidity.com] 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 [truestupidity.com]

    -kgj
  • 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!

    • Hyperbole (Score:4, Funny)

      by hacksoncode ( 239847 ) on Friday November 21, 2003 @02:22PM (#7530839)
      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".

      • Bad Hyperbole (Score:3, Insightful)

        by hellfire ( 86129 )
        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

    • Re:The CIS majors must know something the CS don't (Score:4, Informative)

      by jc42 ( 318812 ) on Friday November 21, 2003 @02:36PM (#7530977) Homepage Journal
      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?

    • It's difficult to call anything in the technology industry impossible, and might be better to say things like, "may not be possible at this time".

      My handwriting comes in two forms: readable, and readable only be me. Maybe one day a computer agent will exist that can read my handwriting, (and that of the average doctor), but due to so much variation in style, angle, size, pressure and so on, it's far away.

      Considering that OCR from a textbook is still imperfect (I spend a reasonable ammount of time conver

    • 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.
    • This from the same people that don't know what a CPU is, can't do simple calculus, and think there is a sustainable market for COBOL programmers.

      I would expect you CIS majors to believe the ads that the handwriting recognition was actually good. When the newton came out, handwritting recognition wasn't possible because the funamental research wasn't done yet. (CPU speed, neural nets for learning, etc.) Handwriting recognition still isn't really possible today. It's closer to gesture recognition as the

    • Re:Handwriting recognition not possible (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Frobnicator ( 565869 ) on Friday November 21, 2003 @05:13PM (#7532554) Journal
      Rather than throw around claims about one group not knowing the impossible and another group able to pull it off...

      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

  • DEC (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Detritus ( 11846 ) on Friday November 21, 2003 @02:17PM (#7530777) Homepage
    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.

    • Re:DEC (Score:5, Insightful)

      by A nonymous Coward ( 7548 ) * on Friday November 21, 2003 @02:25PM (#7530871)
      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.

  • ASP? (Score:3, Funny)

    by gpinzone ( 531794 ) on Friday November 21, 2003 @02:17PM (#7530781) Homepage Journal
    ASPs (Application Service Companies)

    Gee that's "ceculiar" acronym.

  • Best Management Book ever written? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by JayBlalock ( 635935 ) on Friday November 21, 2003 @02:18PM (#7530792)
    I'd say Sun Tzu's 'The Art of War'. Despite being 2,500-odd years old, I can't think of any single text with more plain useful advice for how to manage a major competitive venture of any sort.

    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.

    • I'd say Sun Tzu's 'The Art of War'. Despite being 2,500-odd years old, I can't think of any single text with more plain useful advice for how to manage a major competitive venture of any sort.

      While some of this may be good advice, there have been some strong arguments that the current state of the economy hasn't been helped by treating business as war. Business is about making money, not about defeating and humiliating your enemy, and totally obliterating everyone but yourself on the battlefield.

      Bu

      • I would agree, on the whole, that treating business as a *cutthroat* war is a bad thing. Look at Microsoft. However, on the flip side, any system needs some competition - AKA chaos - to keep it from sliding into entropy and self-destruction.

        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 w

      • Business is not strengthened by the destruction of other businesses---even your competitors.

        But they think that is true, and that is what is really screwed up today, especially with large corporations.

        When you only believe that it is a zero-sum game, the pie does not grow larger. That is the thinking of the dinosaurs of business today.

    • Similarly, Machiavelli's The Prince, a 500-year old text, also has useful advice. Its advice is meant for rulers who wish to keep their country such that the ruler will not be overthrown. It's easy to apply to management.
      • Eh, Machiavelli was pulling half of it out of his arse. The problem with the Prince is that most of the policies are self-destructive in the long run. A leader who employs them will certainly be successful for awhile, but the longer he keeps using them, the more unstable everything becomes.

        And the book is less universal as it was more focused on politics and technologies of the day. Nowadays, the "peasants" don't need to lead a revolutionary war to defeat the leaders - all they have to do is refuse to c

        • Machiavelli was the Renaissance equivalent of a management consultant. His advice is designed to achieve quick results but is not long-term viable. He takes credit for any improvements. He collects his consulting fees and adds another "success story" to his resume. Then he moves onto the next victim.
        • 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 -

        • 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?

    • I once had a manager who's favorite movie was "The Godfather", and you could have guessed it by the way he ran his team.

      We even started referring to the firings as "Bob's not here anymore. He woke up this morning with a horse's head in his bed."

  • I heard that company was brought down by some english guy [imdb.com].

  • Speaking of which (Score:5, Funny)

    by Otter ( 3800 ) on Friday November 21, 2003 @02:20PM (#7530818) Journal
    I was browsing the local tech bookstore a couple of years ago, when Enron was all over the front pages, and noticed a book with a tilted E on the cover. I asked the staffers "Is this book "How to Succeed by Imitating Enron" on sale? They all burst out laughing, conferred and decided to mark it up as a collectors' item instead.

    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.

    • Re:Speaking of which (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Animats ( 122034 )
      Apple's market share today is lower than it was the day Gil Amelio left.
      • If the captain of the Titanic had gotten into a lifeboat after striking the iceberg, by your (implied) logic he could have claimed the sinking wasn't his fault because the boat was still afloat when he left.
        • And to extend that logic, after the Son of God Himself descends from heaven and rescues the ship, you can complain that it's all waterlogged and scratched and it was better with the old captain.

  • So what? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by paiute ( 550198 ) on Friday November 21, 2003 @02:21PM (#7530822)
    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.
    • What do you get out of reading this book?

      Experience? Insight into how to avoid mistakes? A list of what works and what doesn't? a better understanding of history?

      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.

      Which proves that in /. all you need is to diss M$ to get the inanest of comments moderated to "Score

  • Remember... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Doverite ( 720459 )
    The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits.
  • Long narratives are fun reading but what we really need out of business books is a bunch of design patterns for businesses. We already have books on Business Modelling with UML [amazon.com]. Why not start a whole patterns anti-patterns series based on this approach?

  • no surprise (Score:4, Funny)

    by agusus ( 470745 ) on Friday November 21, 2003 @02:27PM (#7530888) Homepage
    Apart from the minor detail that some of the data in the book was faked.


    Well, DUH. What else did you expect in a "management bible"??
  • VeryGeekyBooks [verygeekybooks.com] has more reviews of this book.

  • Best management guide: OfficeSpace (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Helpadingoatemybaby ( 629248 ) on Friday November 21, 2003 @02:34PM (#7530955)
    As an expert on stupidity (I have worked for many stupid people over the years, and have often been one myself) I can make some recommendations.

    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.

    • 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-shi
    • 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.

      Perhaps in a standard corporate environment (read: the environment you're in, whatever that may be), but not so much the pro

    • 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.

      Sounds like the Japanese idea of benign neglect - upper management sits back and allows line managers to get on with the job.

  • Never ask (Score:4, Insightful)

    by BillsPetMonkey ( 654200 ) on Friday November 21, 2003 @02:34PM (#7530964)
    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.

  • Managment 386 (Score:2, Interesting)

    by extremesanity ( 621845 )
    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 s

  • Joel Sposky's preface makes me puke (Score:3, Insightful)

    by RealProgrammer ( 723725 ) on Friday November 21, 2003 @02:48PM (#7531085) Homepage Journal
    Netscape's monumental decision to rewrite their browser instead of improving the old code base cost them several years of Internet time, during which their market share went from around 90% to about 4%, and this was the
    programmers' idea. Of course, the nontechnical and inexperienced management of that company had no idea why this was a bad idea. There are still scads of programmers who defend Netscape's ground-up rewrite. "The old code really sucked, Joel!" Yeah, uh-huh. Such programmers should be admired for their love of clean code, but they shouldn't be allowed within 100 feet of any business decisions, since it's obvious that clean code is more important to them than shipping, uh, software.

    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.

    • 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.

    • Netscape Navigator still needed a rewrite, and adding new features to bad code would still mean them going down, because the software was bad, IMO.

      I used Netscape as long as I could and stay away from the Evil Empire, but after a while it was just too exhausting to put up with the crap, which might have been about year 2000. It was only this year that I started using it again in the form of Mozilla Firebird because it really was better in nearly every way, IMO.

    • Re:Joel Sposky's preface makes me puke (Score:4, Insightful)

      by oskillator ( 670034 ) on Friday November 21, 2003 @04:30PM (#7532095)
      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.

      Criticizing people for not understanding business is precisely what Joel was doing. Delivering good products not the goal of a software company; making money is. Making a good product is a luxury, and it turned out to be one that Netscape couldn't afford. Staying stagnant for three years while your competitor's product is making steady improvements is not the path to victory.

      Also:

      If Marc Andreesen said the code sucked, and needed a rewrite, then it sucked and needed a rewrite

      I'm pretty certain you're not attributing godlike infallibility onto Mr. Andreesen, but I can't parse this sentence any other way. What is it you're trying to say?

    • Re:Joel Sposky's preface makes me puke (Score:4, Interesting)

      by MrWa ( 144753 ) on Friday November 21, 2003 @06:12PM (#7533028) Homepage
      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.

      Not *all* decision making - just business decision making. The decision to completely rewrite the code was based on the merit of the code alone - not on the business or market implications. That is what Sposky and Chapman seem to be saying: programmers should program and leave business decisions to those that know the market.

      There really isn't a good analogy that can compare to this. The decision was basically: stop all shipment of our product so that it can be completely redesigned, built, and tested or attempt to improve the already existing product. The fact that a competitor, with an inferior product, was able to continue shipping while making improvements points to the former being a bad decision.

      This is, of course, all considered in a vacuum while looking at the end results. Other factors besides the code rewrite played a major role in how the "browser war" turned out.

      Delivering good products *is* the goal. Given the choice between A) shipping inferior code that can be incrementally made better and B) shipping NO code while your competitor takes all market share, the choice is obvious. This is the case in every business: you seldom, if *ever*, want to ship NOTHING for months or years at a time (so that you can completely redesign your product) while your competitor becomes firmly entrenched in the market.

    • If you think this is the case you should not live in a capitalistic country. It's just not the way things work.

      You must tolerate inefficiency, stupidity, etc for a while, after which you MAY get the chance to undo some of the damage.

      You need to convince the people who don't know their own field and the people with wrong (as in not conforming to your view of the world) assumptions both think of you as useful and not dangerous to them (I'm still working on the not dangerous part).

      Outclassing people in an a

  • Here's another good book on poor decisions (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Hoi Polloi ( 522990 ) on Friday November 21, 2003 @02:56PM (#7531154) Journal
    Check out Barbara Tuchman's (author of "The Guns of August" and "A Distant Mirror") book "The March of Folly". She is not only an excellent historian but a very good author. "The March of Folly" is about choices being made contrary to one's own self-interest (as she puts it). It is a subject matter very applicable to today's news. George Bush, et al, should read it.

    Amazon Link [amazon.com]

  • Best practices? I can sum it up in three points.. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by pla ( 258480 ) on Friday November 21, 2003 @03:02PM (#7531212) Journal
    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.

    • In a perfect company with perfect managers, perhaps. Your rose-colored glasses approach doesn't account for:

      • Incompetent fellow managers.
      • Incompetent managers above you
      • Unreasonable deadlines that occasionally come up.
      • Employees you'd love to get rid of but can't for one reason or another.

      There's more but you get the idea. Managers, for better or worse, have to work with humans, who are notoriously non-deterministic.

      • Your rose-colored glasses approach doesn't account for:

        The first two have nothing to do with managing the team under you. Both describe hassles that any manager needs to deal with, but do not have much relation to their personal style of managing.

        The third I consider a problem, but one that also has no affect on dealing with one's underlings. Trying to meet an impossible schedule or budget just stresses people out, for no good reason. Or put another way, if I give you the task of proving 1+1=3 by ne

  • Microsoft's big mistakes (Score:5, Insightful)

    by roca ( 43122 ) on Friday November 21, 2003 @03:31PM (#7531436) Homepage
    > 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.
    • None of these mistakes were fatal simply because Microsoft could always fall back on the revenues of their OS monopoly, and later Office monopoly.

      BS. None of the mistakes were fatal because Microsoft has always been very good at picking up the pieces and moving forward. Many other companies had revenue sources/large war chests on which to fall back (Lotus, Novell, Ashton-Tate, Borland, Apple) yet they didn't.

      It gets my goat when people point to companies like Netscape and say "they deserved to be crushe

  • Not totally irrelevant... (Score:3, Funny)

    by imnoteddy ( 568836 ) on Friday November 21, 2003 @03:49PM (#7531638)
    Chapman calls Apple the world's largest irrelevant company

    If it weren't for Apple, who would Microsoft steal user interface ideas from?

  • one reader to another (Score:2, Interesting)

    by lonb ( 716586 )
    I read this book... don't waste your time if you are remotely familiar with computer and tech history.

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