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 examines 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

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #377280 in Books
• Published on: 2006-09-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 408 pages

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.

Customer Reviews

Good, but not as good as promised
I'm a self-admitted nerd with a strong interest in the psychology of marketing, yet somehow this book wasn't quite pitched right. That's quite ironic considering the subject. The book is actually about the (micro)computer hardware and software rise from the early 1980s through the dot-com businesses of 2000. I didn't catch any of that in the long-winded title. I assume a marketing genius would try to convey some portion of that message in the title, but no. (Then again, I did pick up the book and read it, so maybe it worked after all.)

It's not so much a lesson in how to avoid marketing disasters as it is a series of what happened the wrong way at just the wrong time. The author makes some good points, but as a whole the book tends to come off as a long-winded resume of the places where he'd been that failed, and his ability to get out just before they crashed. He seemed to have been in the middle of many meltdowns, but was never persuasive enough to change the course of history.

What I found most interesting was that the span of the book fairly well encapsulates my lifetime, and I didn't realize just how pivotal these years were for computing. I kind of grew up with it without giving it a second thought, so it was fun to revisit some memories and fill in the details of a story I was to young to understand at the time.

Computer marketing explained in an entertaining way
As a techie, I find most marketing books boring. This one was lively enough to keep me interested. The author uses plenty of hyperbole and sarcasm, so it's sometimes hard to tell fact from opinion, but in general, his analyses ring true.

A grim, but highly instructive and entertaining story
I have been in IT since '79 and have seen all the companies Rick talks about come and go. The errors that were made, and still -are- made are mind boggling. All these proverbs about history repeating itself? They are right, when you don't learn from mistakes!