What's in ISOS3?
More!
- More completely avoidable positioning disasters by such luminaries as Microsoft (Windows 8) and Amazon (Fire Phone).
- More stupid PR tricks!
- More clueless high-tech CEOs!
- More high-tech ageism!
- More up-to-date cases studies (but the classics remain)!
- More cultish company cultures!
- More cartoons!
- More insightful analyses of industry trends and future technologies!
What's New!
- STEVE JOBS DISEASE BREAKS OUT NATIONWIDE! CEOs nationwide start wearing black turtlenecks while screaming "disruption!" It all culminates in Elizabeth Holmes, Theranos, and the slaughter of billions of innocent investment dollars.
- JEFF BEZOS CENSORS THE WORLD! Using its monopoly/monpsonie power, Amazon can can now control what books you can see and read. What could possibly go wrong?
- THE BIG SOCIAL MEDIA COMPANIES DECIDE THAT HALF OF AMERICA SUCKS! And so does the First Amendment! No Parler for you, American proles! It's all working out wonderfully as half the country returns the sentiment.
- ARON SORKIN WRITES A STEVE JOBS MOVIE WITHOUT A SINGLE FACT IN IT! (Well, there was a Steve Jobs.)
- YOUTUBE DISCOVERS ORTHODOX JEW BEN SHAPIRO IS A NAZI! (No, seriously.)
- CHINA CREATES THE WORLD'S MOST EVIL SOCIAL NETWORK. (Tik Tok). Americans clamor to join!
- GOOGLE TURNS SEARCH ENGINE INTO "THE MATRIX!" Billions trapped in fake virtual reality!
- AND MUCH, MUCH MORE!
After 15 years, the Classic Is Back! Softletter Releases the 3rd Edition of In Search of Stupidity: Over 40 Years of High-Tech Marketing Disasters
Special Promo: Receive a free copy of Selling Steve Jobs Liver with your purchase and save $9.99!
Liver tells the tale of wantrepreneurs Nate Pennington and Ignacio Loehman as they begin their journey to startup glory. With timely assistance (and operating capital) from Nate’s girlfriend Angie Song, Steve Jobs’ liver (the 1.0 version removed from his body during his transplant operation), and Russian venture capitalist Illarion Antakov, our two heroes embark on a quest to ideate their business vision, instantiate new technologies to bring it to life, and work to motivate the market to embrace their quest to disrupt death itself.
It’s an exciting high-technology adventure that requires Nate and Ignacio to overcome market skepticism, untrustworthy vendors, ICE, and other obstacles.
You don’t want to miss it!
Rick's Personal Guarantee
-
If reading "Selling Steve Jobs' Liver" doesn't:
- Inspire you to ideate new ideas and technologies that disrupt existing business models...
- Spur you to instantiate new content to achieve your startup dreams...
-
Drive you to innovate new marketing programs and industry shaping events...
- I'll be very, very disappointed in you.
Current Softletter Articles
I, Chatbot
…Powered by “cutting edge” AI, chatbots promised an end to tethering and wasted time. Customers instead would be taken into expert guiding hands and quickly receive relevant answers to enquiries and solutions to problems. It all sounded very good, and soon chatbots were spreading across the internet at a rapid pace.
Unfortunately for the technology, as more and more people interacted with chatbots, they became as popular as a diagnosis of Wuhan at a nursing home. (I myself developed a deep loathing of the critters.) The bots were stupid, and their ability to provide useful answers no better than FAQs. Worse, they often provided incorrect information, drove people crazy with repetitive and often nonsensical requests for more input, insulted everyone’s intelligence by trying to pretend to be “human,” and as far as the U.S. market was concerned, churned out far too much fractured and incomprehensible English, probably inducing more people to punch out their screens than has been reported.
Read More…
Excerpted from the latest Softletter Article
Current Stupid Explorations
Return of the Cheese Eating Surrender Monkeys
The phrase “cheese eating surrender monkeys” first entered the main lexicon of American English just before the beginning of the second Iraq war courtesy of the ever-running The Simpsons cartoon series. France’s reputation for toughness has never recovered from that whole WWII-breakout-in-the-Ardennes-Forest thing and when the country declined to join the forces preparing to invade Iraq post 9/11, “surrender monkey” became a popular meme which makes the teeth of every Frenchmen grind.
Thus, it was with some surprise that I found myself writing admiringly of the courage of the French in the third edition of “Stupidity” as Jeff Bezos and his merry band of monopolists/monopolists attempted to take control of the last independent bastion of book publishing, the trades. More formally known as trade book publishers…
Read More…
Excerpted from Rick Chapman’s upcoming book, Bare Ruined Wires: How Big Social Media Destroyed America’s Faith and Trust in High-Tech.
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Leading the way in SaaS Since 2006
2001 – Softletter details the collapse of the SaaS predecessor, ASP (Application Software Provider) in the first edition of In Search of Stupidity.
2005 – Softletter releases first article on the comeback of the ASP model as “Software as a Service.”
2006 – Softletter releases first detailed report on the growing SaaS movement.
2007 – Softletter holds industry’s first SaaS conference…
“Keeping Social Order Online” from Chapter 14, “The Social Ministries:
Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Various Other Enforcers
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