I enjoyed the book and think there's a subversive thread in it that your comments allude to. If you accept the story as an underdog success tale you might be f

I enjoyed the book and think there's a subversive thread in it that your comments allude to. If you accept the story as an underdog success tale you might be frustrated. If on the other hand you read it as a cautionary tale about what happens when all you have is buzz and marketing runs your company, I think you might enjoy it more. The book purports to tell the story of how the Sega Genesis came out of nowhere to win massive market share in the gaming industry, but as you said the actual story consists of a long string of marketing junkets related anecdotally by the marketers in attendance. Discussion of software engineering and hardware design is scant. Meanwhile there's an entire chapter dedicated to play-by-play of a weekend retreat Sega hosted for video game distributors. There's a few takeaways from this: 1. Distribution (marketing, sales, partnerships) is sometimes the whole story. The Genesis story basically boiled down to "they made a fun game with a cute mascot and then hired the right ad agency to flog it nationwide at massive cost". As "makers" hanging out on HN that's an offensive reading of history but the author talked to the principals and that's the story they told. 2. If all you have is distribution, any gains you find will be unsustainable. I found the last chapters of the book a downer. The Sega America folks were tasked with marketing a confusing lineup of products, couldn't get consumers excited about them, so they all jumped ship one by one. At the end of the day they were just a bunch of marketers and that could only take them so far. While the book's decision to tell the story of the Genesis through its marketing seems to belittle the work of the actual product people back in Japan, it's gentle telling of Sega America's collapse post-Genesis shows the limitations of a marketing-only approach. 3. While the book appears to lionize the "underdog" Sega America team, in the end it's the Nintendo folks who come across most impressively. The chapters where the authors cuts back to what Nintendo was up to at the time show a company with actual substance, identity, and a point of view. While the "heroes" of the book run around from marketing strategy to marketing strategy, the "villains" quietly and confidently go about the business of making great products, manipulating distribution in a heavy handed yet open way, and marketing their products in simple, relatable marketing. In the end, though the book appears to promote a "marketing is all that matters" approach to business it really argues that lasting success come from companies that are product driven.