In Search Of Stupidity

There is a cruel and guilty pleasure to be had watching people slipping on banana skins. I must confess, though, I don’t feel quite so guilty for chuckling at people who slip on banana skins which they themselves have thrown down in their own paths!

In Search Of Stupidity is choc full of corporate banana skins which companies ranging from Ashton-Tate and Borland to IBM and Novell have carefully placed onto the sidewalk (often with much pomp, circumstance and huge marketing budgets) and then, in the full glare of their self-made publicity, have gone right ahead and trodden on them - often taking the companies involved to the brink, and not infrequently, right over the edge, of disaster...

There are stories of famous high-flying companies and products which, through their own foolishness, ended up sinking almost with a trace. Where now is the world’s most famous word processor, WordStar? What happened to the Windows-like Gem desktop? And how on earth did IBM managed to make a failure out of OS/2?

The stories of corporate failures can’t all be attributed to bad products or technical incompetence (though these play their part). There are too, just dumb decisions. Like IBM’s decision to launch OS/2 ‘Warp’ by using Star Trek actors and names (‘Klingon’, ‘Ferengi’) pinched from the TV shows without bothering to ask the owners of the Star Trek franchise, Paramount, what they thought of this ploy. In the event, Paramount didn’t think much of it - IBM backed down and began downplaying the Star Trek angle, with the end result that the name ‘Warp’ only conjured up associations with ‘bent’, ‘twisted’ or ‘out of shape’ rather than boldly going where no software product had gone before.

Then there is the long and strange saga of Borland. Beginning by selling small, cheap software - Turbo Pascal and Sidekick - Borland suddenly went into a corporate world domination frenzy, buying up software left, right and centre: including two databases (Paradox and dBase) and a spreadsheet (Quattro). This book doesn’t mention Borland’s ‘chameleon word processor’, Sprint, whose sudden rise and fall could probably justify a book unto itself.

There are, in fact, a good many other great software failures that the book misses out: who now remembers Lotus’s revolutionary word processor, Manuscript or the same company’s revolutionary spreadsheet, Improv? And what about Microsoft’s ‘Turbo Pascal-killer’, QuickPascal or its Lisp product, muLisp?

While the delights of in Search Of Stupidity are, I confess, predominantly of the ‘cruel humour’ variety, there is also a positive side. For anyone who is in the software business or has ambitions to launch a software product, there are good lessons to be learnt from other people’s mistakes. The author has a useful chapter, ‘On Avoiding Stupidity’, pointing out some of these lessons.

All in all this is a very enjoyable, if slightly guilty, read...