They say that history is written by the victors. Furthermore, I’d like to add that in the business world, history ends up being written primarily about the victors. For every 10 new books about Google coming out, you’d be hard pressed to find a single memorial to Altavista. To me, this seems to be a large oversight in technological cultural tradition. Why?
It’s because we can learn from mistakes. Thus, studying the characteristics of technological business failures should be able to provide insight on how to not to fail. Good military histories include sturdy analyses of both sides of a battle, so why shouldn’t we extend this rigor to the development of business history?
I for one would greatly appreciate a book or two that systematically examines numerous businesses failures, comparing key traits both across and within industries. Right now the unspoken model in the corporate psyche is to engage in “hero-worship” of the companies that comes out on top, emulating the strategies of these lucky few. From a data-analysis standpoint, learning from the one or two successes while ignoring the information available about the dozens of failures seems like an exercise in maximizing skew and minimizing numerical robustness.
