In Search of Stupidity, over 20 years of high-tech marketing disaster is an amusing book about the marketing and development of commercial software by Merrill R. Chapman. Some of the chapters deal with poor decisions by word-processing companies like MicroPro that ended up with two competing products (WordStar 3.3 and Wordstar 2000) and completely different programs. MicroPro International, according to Chapman was in 1983 the largest microcomputer software company with close to 70 million in sales. The problem was they the WordStart programming team was fired (or quit) and a new team bought up had a different word-processor in development.
One thing this book documents well is the battles between the management/marketing folk, on the one hand, and the developers, on the other. The fault does not always lie with the marketing folk. Chapman describes situations where the developers decide to totally redevelop a product from the ground up when the market is expecting a timely upgrade. Philippe Kahn of Borland, for example, decided to redevelop Paradox completely in object-oriented code and ended up alienating his users just when Microsoft released Access.
The one company that stands out as consistently avoiding fatal stupid mistakes is Microsoft which may explain why they are now so much bigger than any other software company. That Microsoft had an experienced programmer as lead probably meant there was never the sort of disconnect that doomed other software companies.
The book is partly a response to In Search of Excellence which lauded a number of high-tech companies as having excellent coporate cultures. Unfortunately many of the “excellent” companies didn’t last … hence the search for stupidity.
Check out their Museum Exhibits of stupid marketing.