Marketing Disasters

We Hate You We Really Hate You Ed Esber Ashton Tate 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...

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...

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,...

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...

An Interview with Joel Spolsky

SoftwareMarketSolution Joel, what, in your opinion, is the single greatest development sin a software company can commit Joel Spolsky Deciding to completely rewrite your product from scratch, on the theory that all your code is messy and bug-prone and is bloated and needs to be completely rethought and rebuilt from ground zero. JS Because it's almost never true. It's not like code rusts if it's not used. The idea that new code is better than old is patently absurd. Old code has been used. It...