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