Finance-Software

Rama Dev Jager and Rafael Ortiz present an excellent series of 16 interviews with the digital world's most successful leaders: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, T.J. Rodgers, Gordon Eubanks, Steve Case, Scott Cook, Sandy Kurtzig, John Warnock, Charles Geschke, Michael Dell, Charles Wang, Andy Grove, Trip Hawkins, Ed McCracken, Ken Olsen, and Bill Hewlett. Each interview begins with a brief history of how each person founded a company and produced groundbreaking change in the digital industry. These pioneers answer many probing questions about their achievements, visions for the future of electronic technology, and tips for success. Their interview responses are highly informative and engaging. The book is thoughtfully written and well edited. Although much of its advice will be familiar to experienced marketers, managers, and executives, we [...] recommend it to them because of the useful and interesting inside look at the techniques and insights these industry leaders employed to such successful results.

This is truly an excellent book, with great insights into the minds of the technology elite -- the questions are great, and the answers from these CEOs are even better! I learned a lot from reading and rereading this book, and the Q&A made the book very fun to read. If you are planning a career in high-tech, this book will be worthwhile.

Steve Jobs interview is well worth the price of the book. Fortunately, the insights don't stop there. T.J. Rodgers, Charles Wang, Gordon Eubanks, Steve Case, and so on are incredibly interesting people. The most boring interviews would probably have to be Andy Grove and Bill Gates! These visionaries are true role models in business and in life. Their conviction and their passion truly speaks volumes. I learned more reading this book then any marketing or finance course I have taken so far. Nothing compares to this book. I would love to see a sequal with Larry Ellison, Scott McNealy, Lou Gerstner, etc. Well worth the price of admission.

The author describes his experience and observations around famous failures in software industry. The language is very entertaining. His description of MicroPro's dilemma with Word Start and Word Star 2000 'MicroPro wrestled itself to the ground' made me laugh.

Author's repeated description of 'I was there', 'I was the first one', 'I still have that floppy' etc. are boring. A bit of foot notes are good, but this book has tons.

This is a good book for entertainment. Not a great one if you want to learn something serious.

I loved this book.

Kind of like stupid human tricks for software companies.

This book offers many funny anecdotes choked full of technical marketing lessons. They were very relevant for me as my career traced the rise of high-tech over the last two decades.

One can only wonder how management at once-major players (Novell, Ashton Tate, Netscape, etc) acted so "stupidly". You would think its quite difficult to screw the pooch when you are the dominate networking vendor (e.g., Novell) , have the 1st mover advantage, annually sell billions in product, customers like your product and have several 1000 employees. But Rick describes in painstaking detail Novells wrenching fall. Having built several Novell and Microsoft oriented products, this chapter alone for me was worth the price of the book.

Plus the book was hard to put down with all the named names... Ed Esber, Ray Noorda, Jim Manzi, Philippe Khan stupid human tricks.

If you are in the tech business, buy this book. Read it too.

I bought this book after it was recommended to me by a friend who I'd worked with at Novell during the period that Merril Chapman describes, during the 90s when Microsoft was tearing the guts out of NetWare and taking away our leadership in LANs. A lot of people from Novell have bought the book since it's about the only one that analyzes what happened at Novell and Chapman has just about nailed it. I'm still wondering who told him about our closing down our 3rd party development operation in Austin.

I'm the president of a new startup and I've bought a couple of copies of In Search of Stupidity and I've asked my entire management staff to read it. Afterwards, I asked some of my people to tell me what they learned. A couple of my managers just shrugged and said they didn't think the book applied to them. I find that interesting because these are my weakest people. My best hires discuss the book constantly and have begun to take another look at some of our marketing programs based on some of the analysis in Stupidity. For us, the book is a very valuable guide, we've started running some of our marketing plans against the stories to make sure we're not repeating history. Chapman says he's planning a sequel and no one wants to be in it.

What's also interesting about this book is the strong reactions it generates. You can tell by reading some of the reviews here. For instance, the comments by some people that the book deals only with dead companies or that the author worked for all these companies. Stupidity describes the problems at companies like Novell, Borland, IBM, Microsoft, Motorola, Intel and lots of others who are clearly still in business. And while Chapman worked for a couple of the companies he writes about, he doesn't claim to have worked for them all. Some of these reviews seem odd to me, like the person writing them hadn't actually read the book. This book seems to make some people very uncomfortable. I can imagine why.