Chapter 5 We Hate You We Really Hate You Ed Esber AshtonTate and Siebel Systems
Many people have pointed to Ed Esber's PR ineptitude as the main reason for Ashton-Tate's demise, but this is wrong. It is rare for PR disasters to destroy a company, though they can certainly hurt it and be very expensive. Ed Esber's primary mistake was in failing to understand that Ashton-Tate wasn't just selling a product it was creating an ecosystem. dBase was a platform, a basic set of tools and functions that could be adapted to create applications in a myriad of businesses. As such, its...
Death by Doppelganger MicroPro
Rubinstein's initial goal in founding MicroPro was to develop and publish a high-end database management system DBMS designed to compete with Ashton-Tate's dBASE and similar products, but during his stint at IMSAI, he learned the CP M market needed a good programmer's text editor. Because developing one would take less time than a full-blown DBMS system and provide the company with a revenue stream until the database product was ready, Rubinstein hired Rob Barnaby, a top-notch assembly language...
Percent Loyal
During the late 1990s customer relationship management CRM software was one of software's hottest new categories. CRM products are bulked-up versions of sales contact managers such as ACT and GoldMine that became popular in the late 1980s and early 1990s. CRM packages are designed to move beyond managing sales prospects and, in theory, offer companies the ability to manage every aspect of their customer relationships, from buying through returns. In the late 1990s, CRM's 800-pound gorilla was...
Acknowledgments
John F. Kennedy once said, Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan. Writing this book has certainly borne this maxim out Not only did most of the people I spoke to during its development not want to be credited, but a few threatened me with dire bodily harm if I did. Nonetheless, a brave few souls have agreed to allow their contributions to this effort to be recognized, and I'd like to take this opportunity to acknowledge their help and assistance. Those listed in my escutcheon...
Heart of Darkness
For no particular reason that I can remember, the topic turned to Ashton-Tate, publisher of the widely popular dBASE database program. Seymour started talking about a meeting he'd attended with other members of the press where Ed Esber, CEO of the database giant, addressed the group. As he began talking about Esber, his face suddenly developed an expression of contempt. He told us how during the speech Esber had stated at one point that he wasn't necessarily the smartest guy in software....
The Sins of Branding
But even those who have learned that a brand is a symbol often fall into error by failing to understand that a brand can arise from only two sources. The first is as a result of product success. Most brand identities spring from this source. For example, Proctor amp Gamble transformed Crest from just another contender to America's leading toothpaste for decades after persuading the American Dental Association that Crest really did help prevent cavities. For a time, Crest was the only toothpaste...
Introduction
In 1982, Harper amp Row published In Search of Excellence Lessons from America's Best-Run Companies by Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman, Jr. In Search of Excellence quickly became a seminal work in the category of business management books and made its authors millionaires. Although it's no longer the literary obsession of freshly minted MBAs that it was in the 1980s, the book's distribution and influence have proved long lasting and pervasive. After its introduction, the book stayed on...
Netscape and Marc Andreessen Will You Please Just Shut Up
If you like to go horror movies, you know the cast usually sports a character you've come to think of as The Idiot Who Deserves to Die. He's the knucklehead who runs screaming into the path of Godzilla just as the giant reptile is heading out to spend a relaxing afternoon destroying Tokyo, and gets squashed like a bug. The dimwit who sticks his noggin out of the deserted cabin in the woods and yells out Mad slasher What mad slasher just before the mad slasher decapitates him. The space-bound...
Fabulous Fruit
Of all the characters waiting expectantly for the train to pull out of the station, Apple was probably the best positioned of the early denizens of Microcomputerville to become the town's mayor. Apple's mainstay system, the Apple II, and its immediate successor, the Apple II , were triumphs of industrial design and utility. Sleek and low slung, the units provided an attractive contrast to the stark industrial designs common to business machines. The Apple was reasonably priced a fully...
The Fall of the Barbarian Empire
Faced with both pricing and feature disadvantages, sales of Quattro, as well as WordPerfect, 1-2-3, and others, began to sag. Shocked out of his civilized demeanor, Kahn fell back on barbarian tactics. Borland launched an inept series of promotions designed to stop erosion in Quattro sales. The company accomplished the exact opposite instead, destroying the product's credibility. The first disaster was the Quattro WinDOS bundle. The promotion was Kahn's idea, and he insisted on its execution...
A RATHER NUTTY TALE IBM and the PC Junior
To fully appreciate the tale you're about to read, we must take a trip back through time. We begin our journey in search of ancient high-tech stupidity by boarding a time machine of the imagination. Step into the conveyance, sit down, hold tight, and let's begin our journey to modern high technology's Paleolithic era. Even the word microcomputing gives us a sense of antiquity and great age these days, we say desktop computer or workstation. Relax as we travel through eons of hightech time in...
First Movers First Mistakes
IBM, Digital Research, Apple, and Microsoft The birth of what we now think of as high tech began in 1975 with the introduction of the Altair, the world's first affordable and practical microcomputer, from Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems MITS of New Mexico. Units such as the French Micral and the American Scelbi were introduced prior to the Altair, but you couldn't do much with them. The brainchild of former U.S. Air Force Engineer Ed Roberts, the Altair was sold in kit form for...
Gates at the Barbarian
While Philippe Kahn was being ravished by the object-oriented light, Microsoft released its Office suite in 1991 for a retail price of 495.00 and immediately began to do serious damage to its competitors in the business applications market. Microsoft Office was not so much a well-thought-out strategy as it was an attempt by Microsoft to punish Borland for all those competitive upgrade promotions the company was constantly launching at its software rivals. When the suite was first introduced,...
Who Killed OS2
Yet, despite IBM's record of stunning marketing and sales incompetence, OS 2 refused to die. Work continued on the product despite the Microsoft tsunami, and in 1992 IBM released OS 2 2.0. This version of the product was years ahead of Windows in terms of raw functionality, and only until the release of Windows 2000 did a comparable product exist. Unlike the 16-bit Windows and OS 2 1.x, 2.0 was a 32-bit OS that could take full advantage of the 386, 486, and Pentium processors. It sported a...
Coup de Grace
In the pre-PC era, IBM's PR strategy was a conventional but effective big company approach that garnered IBM a great deal of public respect. The company invested in public charities, sponsorships of select TV and theater programs, advertising, and the usual editorial placements in a wide variety of publications to build and maintain its public image. Its approach was held up as a model of effective PR and marketing communications. However, as was true of most IBM marketing programs, its PR...
Preface
In the first edition of In Search of Stupidity Over 20 Years of HighTech Marketing Disasters, I made a deliberate decision to avoid giving specific advice about how companies could avoid being stupid. At the time, I thought the process was fairly obvious study the mistakes of the past, apply self-observation to your current behavior, and if you see yourself repeating a previous example of idiocy, stop and do something else. As I point out in Chapter 1, the claim that high-tech companies are...
The Great Pentium Bunny Roast Intel Inside
In this environment, semiconductor giant Intel spotted an opportunity. Earlier in its history, the company had launched a marketing campaign aimed at IT types that was designed to convince them they should be concerned about whether their computers were built around Intel's 386 processor. The program had been fairly successful, and now Intel believed it was time to be more ambitious and make Intel a household name. Though people increasingly cared less about what company manufactured their PC,...
Reluctant Ahab
As with the IBM PC, many myths surround the rise of Microsoft to high tech's position of paramount leader. The seminal myth hearkens back to the company's anointment as the supplier of the OS for the PC, the single greatest coup in the history of business. The popular story backed up by such sources as The Pirates of Silicon Valley, an interesting and well-acted film that does a complete disservice to the cause of truth is that IBM intended to use Digital Research's buff new 16-bit operating...