Together with the complimentary copy of "The Product Marketing Handbook for Software", Rick Chapman also sent me a copy of "In Search of Stupidity: Over twenty years of high-tech marketing disasters". In five words: this book is true marvel.

My 9-horseshoes review follows (also available at Javaranch.com):

I would qualify this book as a great marketing antipattern repository. All the true stories reported by Rick Chapman illustrate the worst practices in high-tech marketing he experienced over the past twenty years. With an entertaining narrative style, he immerses you in the corporate life of the big companies he worked at and delivers a fair dose of crispy details about some scary war stories that you wouldn't believe they actually happened. You would think that companies like IBM, Microsoft, Novell and Borland to cite a few, have never (rarely) made stupid mistakes. Well, you're wrong! As the saying goes, “nobody’s perfect”. This statement gets all its sense when applied to people working for big corporations that have the money and the brain cells, but despite this, still manage to shoot themselves in the feet every now and then. Money doesn’t buy you anything, but it is isually a good magnet for stupid managers, so watch out!

To understand the content of this book, there is no need to be a marketing guru whose resume reaches the moon. In fact, this book is suitable to pretty much anyone, whether you want to discover which practices to avoid at all costs, or whether you simply want to laugh out loud and despise those wannabe "deus ex machina" working for big corporations. Grab your copy, sit down comfortably and start turning the pages. You won't regret it, unless of course you were actively involved in one of those shameful and pathetic undertakings :)