The Silicon Valley Canon, Circa 1998: A Stroll Down Software Memory Lane

Something fun happened today. A reader reached out who had been digging through my early-2000s and 2010s posts trying to understand the history of the software industry. That immediately got my attention because I love people who study history. It’s the best way to understand the present. And a great way to avoid repeating the mistakes of those who preceded you.

So I’m always happy when someone wants to talk about software history.

His specific request was interesting: he was looking for case studies or books that were popular at the time — something that would help him understand how people in the industry were thinking back then.

I decided to do him one better. In my view, the real canon of books that shaped enterprise software thinking was largely written before 2000. So I assembled the following reading list: a set of 1990s-era books on software, strategy, marketing, and the industry itself that many of us were reading while the enterprise software industry was taking shape.

Think of it as a reading-list stroll down software, and Silicon Valley, memory lane.

1990s Era Tech Marketing and Strategy Books

High-Tech Marketing

• Marketing High Technology — William Davidow (1986)
• Crossing the Chasm — Geoffrey Moore (1991)
• The Gorilla Game — Geoffrey Moore, Paul Johnson & Tom Kippola (1998)
• The Regis Touch — Regis McKenna (1985)

Positioning / Marketing Foundations

• Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind — Al Ries & Jack Trout (1981)
• The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing — Al Ries & Jack Trout (1993)
• Ogilvy on Advertising — David Ogilvy (1983)

Technology Strategy / Innovation

• The Innovator’s Dilemma — Clayton Christensen (1997)
• Competing for the Future — Gary Hamel & C. K. Prahalad (1994)
• Only the Paranoid Survive — Andrew Grove (1996)
• The Discipline of Market Leaders — Michael Treacy & Fred Wiersema (1995)

Product Marketing Culture

• The Macintosh Way — Guy Kawasaki (1990)

Enterprise Sales / Go-to-Market

• SPIN Selling — Neil Rackham (1988)
• Solution Selling — Michael Bosworth (1995)

Economics of Software / Networks

• Information Rules — Carl Shapiro & Hal Varian (1998)

Enterprise Technology Industry Case Studies

• Softwar: An Intimate Portrait of Larry Ellison and Oracle — Matthew Symonds (2003)
• The Ingres Papers: Anatomy of a Relational Database System — Michael Stonebraker et al (1985). Technical background on Ingres that provides useful context prior to reading Softwar.
• The New New Thing — Michael Lewis (1999)
• Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire — James Wallace & Jim Erickson (1992)
• Accidental Empires — Robert X. Cringely (1992)

Software Engineering

• The Mythical Man-Month — Frederick P. Brooks Jr. (1975)

Classical Strategy

• The Art of War — Sun Tzu