A second edition has recently been released – it is not a hard cover anymore. The second edition adds a chapter on proprietary/opensource technologies and a chapter on avoiding stupid mistakes!
I found out about In Search of Stupidity because it was mentioned in The Best of Software Writing. The title made me think about my lack of marketing know-how, and I thus ordered the book. It made a very interesting read – but did it help my marketing skills?
In Search of Stupidity is subdivided into chapters. Each chapter looks at one company that fuxated – and starts off with a very funny comic:
The companies covered range from IBM to Ashton-Tate, Netscape, the dotcom bubble and Microsoft get mentioned, too. Each of the chapters looks at how the company fuxated itself – what went wrong, why it went wrong, and most importantly why this was a bad idea even back then.
The mistakes covered range from development idiocies, releases of lite products and other product mistakes over to marketing and positioning ‘hooplas’. Marx has said that history repeats itself…and why not save yourself a few mistakes(you will make enough of them, trust me)!
Merril R. Chapman made a good job writing a clear and readable text. The book contains next to no technical jargon and is very funny – this reads like literature rather than a classic dry book.
Overall, history tends to repeat itself. Reading this book helps you avoid many common mistakes – if you run a software house and want a funny read, get this by all means. The price of 17$ at Amazon’s is worth it(there also is a very interesting bundle with Joel on Software)!
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