I Sing the Body Electronic : A Year With Microsoft on the Multimedia Frontier

by Fred Moody

Moody chronicles his year observing a young and inexperienced team of Microsoft developers working on a children's multimedia project under the dictatorial leadership of Bill Gates. For general readers. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

Genres: Business, Computers, Software, Nonfiction, Technology, History

336 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

Reviews

[JP · Rating 3 out of 5]

A coder or designer could find this book engaging; a normal human would not. While the senior developer on my team found it interesting, I as project manager found it too "close to home." The author chronicles the history of the Sendak project and it's team of intelligent, intense players. Combined with pressure from Bill Gates, a goal of delivering on time, dependency on the SPAM project to provide core tools, and no clear requirements, the team went through months and months of leaps and tangents. The time frame is fixed but whenever everything else slipped or requirements changed at the last minute, the late delivery was blamed on the final one to carry the baton -- the developer. And yet somehow, through intensity and politics, teams scrambled and succeeded. One other point worth mentioning: the author shows snippets of C++ code as needed to illustrate points -- quite effectively.

[Jeff Keehr · Rating 3 out of 5]

The history of the Sendak project at Microsoft, which eventually produced a children's encyclopedia dubbed EXPLORAPEDIA. The author spent about a year with the team of designers, artists and programmers. (Gimmel was about the only programmer ever mentioned, but there were others.) The project seemed to be a shambles most of the time, with an incredible series of internecine battles. But the author believes that overall the team was effective in doing something that was unique. By comparison, ENCARTA, a standard encyclopedia on CD, took 4 years to create while EXPLORAPEDIA took about 1 year. Microsoft has incredibly deep pockets so it can fund these kinds of projects (estimated cost of EXPLORAPEDIA = 3.2 million). But it is also becoming the GM of software, which may result in the same arteriosclerosis that nearly did in the auto company.

[grundoon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Allowing a writer seemingly carte blanche access into the bottom-line-driven, labor-law-flouting, goat-rodeo culture that was 1993 Microsoft was probably not the wisest PR move. But it makes for good reading, an excellent reminder as to why I (twice) left the corporate world, and probably a bit of relief to many trench denizens that at least they weren't in THAT group.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some cover blurbs compare this book to Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder. This comparison is valid up to a point. The story of the Data General Eclipse is much more technical. Only a bare fraction of the text covers techincal issues, beyond the very legitimate complaints of the developer that he cannot begin work before the specifications are complete, or at least a first draft exists.

On the other hand, this book may be seen as quite technical in a business and management sense. Team members' temperaments, perceptual schemes and background impedimentia differ. The resulting personality conflicts almost sink the project. The book works as a business case study, in terms of presenting peolpe problems which are very particular and very difficult.

This difficulty finds its way to the foundations of a good story. The book is an entertaining read, even if one finds few of the issues engaging before opening the book.

Eventually a more abstract drama emerges between perceptions, motivational techniques and accountablity.

[Zach · Rating 4 out of 5]

this book showed me some points that I still refer to now, even after 12-13 years. An example is that designers and programmers have a difficult time understanding each other. Still valid problem today.

[Lysergius · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is so reassuring to me to know that working at Microsoft sucks as much as their products suck to use. Amen. The future is open source!

[Zoe Cattolico · Rating 4 out of 5]

Our bartender wrote this book and loaned me a copy. It was good! Neat to read about Microsoft in the '90s now that I'm there.