I just finished reading In Search of Stupidity: Over 20 Years of High-Tech Marketing Disasters, by Merrill R. (Rick) Chapman. Steve has a review here
if you missed it. It’s a bit dated, but is a great retrospective
of our industry over the past twenty years. I’d say it’s required
reading for anyone who hasn’t been in the industry for twenty
years, like myself. Since I started working around 1993, and
missed the pre-windows days of CP/M systems and VisiCalc, this
book was a great history lesson for me. But what really
struck me was the common sense perspective he takes on product
marketing and the bubble. His view of what happened to all of us
in the past 10 years has never been explained so clearly.
The interesting thing is that he describes so many stupid high-tech
marketing ideas that we were all caught up in, and today they appear so
plainly stupid that it’s embarrassing. Especially if you’re like
me and bought every idea, hook, line and sinker. Here’s some
examples of stupid ideas of the past ten years that I was completely
caught up in:
ASPs and Networked Computers – Well, of course this idea was
stupid. As he points out, no one wanted to rent their software,
especially when it was doggedly slow, and it also turns out we need spell
checkers so often it doesn’t make any sense
to rent them. But the thing was, I thought it was a good
idea! I remember thinking what a cool thing it would be to
have one of these units, running Word and Excel remotely, and how if I
just needed a spell checker, I could just rent one. What a
totally stupid idea!
The Internet Bubble – Yes we all have been reminded that
companies have to make money, and that shipping 50lb bags of dog food
all over the company to fulfill a $10 order is stupid, but again, I
thought it didn’t matter! I remember telling people, all that
matters is branding and unique daily visits. Get the traffic and
the money will follow. I also remember telling people that the
DJIA could possibly go up to well over 25,000! Geesh, how could I
(we) have been more wrong!
So I began to wonder, are we currently making the same stupid
mistakes by jumping on the Open Source bandwagon? Certainly there
are successes, like RedHat, and even our own friends Telligent Systems, but is open source a good idea for everyone, especially smaller projects? If you read the hype from Red Hat you’d think so:
Open source is inevitable. It returns control to the customer.
The code is open and you can see it, change it, learn from it. Bugs are
more quickly found and fixed. And when customers don't like how one
vendor is serving them, they can choose another without overhauling
their infrastructure. That means: No more arbitrary pricing. No more
technology lock-in. No more monopolies.
I’m beginning to worry about this. I’m having a hard time getting anyone to submit feedback for my soon to be Open Source WSMQ
project. I’ve had close to 400 downloads of the thing, but if I can’t
get anyone to tell if they even think it’s a good
(or lousy) piece of software, how am I every going to
get people to donate time or money to the project? I’m still
in the very early stages, and haven’t even released it yet, but the
writing is on the wall.
Could it be that if you give people something for free,
they will just take it and give you nothing in return? And by
nothing, I mean nothing. No free development, certainly no
money, and not even a thank you.. Can we blame them? Don’t
we all do the same thing?
I’m left with this sinking feeling that in another 5 years, Merrill Chapman will write another book, called We Found Stupidity: But We Did It Again.
In it, he’ll chronicle all sorts of stuff that we’re talking about
right now, like the fact that letting your employees blog
company direction is probably stupid. And I think that
he may just point out to all of us that
the idea of making money by giving something away, could
perhaps be, well… stupid.
-Brendan