I Sing the Body Electronic: A Year with Microsoft on the Multimedia Frontier [Paperback]

Fred Moody (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1, 1996

Fred Moody spent a year shadowing a team of Microsoft developers working on a children's compact disc to be called Explorapedia. What he discovered was that, when the novelty and excitement surrounding the newest generation of software is stripped away, one finds a world not of high-tech efficiency but of simple human muddling.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

An outsider is allowed into the labyrinth to watch a Microsoft multimedia project from conception to partial completion. If you are interested in understanding Microsoft's strengths--and weaknesses--breaking into new markets, this is a must-read book. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Freelance writer Moody spent the year from December 1992 through December 1993 with six members of a Microsoft unit that was developing a children's multimedia reference product named Sendak. As he was given virtually unlimited access to the group, Moody is able to present a week-by-week account of the trials and tribulations of each team member as they try to make Sendak a viable product. In describing the inner workings of Microsoft, Moody reveals a company not immune to the corporate politics and personality conflicts that afflict huge companies, but one that nevertheless is willing to push the boundaries of technology, driven by chairman Bill Gates's obsession with staying ahead of the competition. Indeed, Moody's accounts of meetings with Gates are compelling. A fast-paced read that does not get bogged down in technical jargon, the book suffers from one flaw: Sendak was far from finished when Moody's year with Microsoft was up, so he describes its completion and launch?the product was shipped in November 1994 under the name Explorapedia?in relatively few pages. 50,000 first printing.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) (August 1, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0140176551
• ISBN-13: 978-0140176551
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #603,051 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The reality of software development, August 19, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: I Sing the Body Electronic: A Year with Microsoft on the Multimedia Frontier (Paperback)

So many of the books about software development I have read are about an organized, heroic march from conception to delivery. This book is a much more realistic depiction of the chaos and mess that most people actually live with in real world software development. Moody did a good job of just telling the story and not judging the messiness or trying to clean it up to create the typical late night, pizza boxes and Jolt Cola heroic story. He does a good job of discussing the complex human issues surrounding the project and their importance relative to the actually technical issues. Creating the technology turns out to be relatively simple compared to the challenge of getting a group of people from very diverse backgrounds to function effectively as a team. This challenge is particularly strong in consumer technology products because the range of backgrounds required is so broad. The communications and collaboration skills needed to allow artist and programmers to work together are insightfully revealed in this book

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Pushing the Envelope, January 19, 2007

By 

Gary Keene "Eclectic Reader" (Carlsbad, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: I Sing the Body Electronic: A Year with Microsoft on the Multimedia Frontier (Paperback)

As mentioned in the introduction, you could read this as a story of success or a record of failure, depending on your focus. The Sendak/Explorapedia was released a year late, overbudget, and did not meet the original design objective of a complete multimedia children's encyclopedia on one CD-Rom. On the other hand, it actually did meet the original estimated release date, and it went on to become a best seller and a benchmark in it's category.

Actually, I think Fred Moody missed seeing the real benefit to Microsoft of the Explorapedia project. While Moody focussed on chronicling the damage created by the personality conflicts and differences in communication styles, he missed seeing the positive consequences of tackling a project like this which pushes the envelope of existing technology.

For instance, here is my take on two of the "problems" described by Moody:

1: In the beginning, there was no software developer assigned fulltime to the project.
Positive result: The designers, who were mostly Mac people, designed the encyclopedia to use Mac-like features, such as sprites with transparent backgrounds. This was not available on the PC at that time, but the positive end result is that when the PC designers finally started work on the encyclopedia, they were forced to come up with solutions that emulated Mac-like graphics features on the PC, solutions which inevitably expanded the capabilities of the PC and brought it closer to the Mac graphics benchmark.

2: Software tools such as Merismus and SPAM were not fully available when the project started.
Positive result: This may be the largest contributor for the project's slipped schedule, but the benefit of developing the tools concurrently with the application is that the development of tool features is driven by the immediate needs of the innovative application. Otherwise, the Merismus and SPAM tools would probably have been developed looking backwards to the Encarta project, as in "gee, Encarta would have been a lot easier to do with this tool." Instead, motivated by the needs of Explorapedia, the new tools were driven towards making succeeding generations of software easier to develop, rather than preceding generations.

Applying this to my field, hardware development, it illustrates the value of starting a project even if, in the beginning, it does not appear to be feasible within the current state of the art. After all, somebody has to define the state of the art; it might as well be your project. And the shape of a new tool cannot be defined until you know the size and shape of the problem it must solve. Also, as with Mac graphics on a PC, it helps to have a target to shoot for, and the knowledge that it's been done before.

To be critical of this book, I would say that a lot of Moody's focus is on communication conflicts: the analytical developers don't value the artistic designers, the women don't manage conflict like the men do, the permanent employees dismiss the contract workers. Another author, Deborah Tannen, has covered this ground with more insight, and Moody's descriptions of conflict between individuals are much easier to understand when reviewed from Tannen's point of view. For the most part, Moody settles for a gossipy telling of all the dirt that went on between people, with little revelation for what caused the conflicts, how they might have been avoided, and why the project succeeded in spite of those challenges. In the end, his revelation is that the project teams are deliberately given impossible goals by Bill Gates, with the intent that every team member, perceiving his last project to be a failure, goes on to other projects with the idea that they must work extra hard to overcome the stigma of that last failure. I doubt that even Bill Gates is that Machiavellian.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars SOftware Development and People, April 3, 2001

By 

Dexter Aparicio (Philippines) - See all my reviews

This review is from: I Sing the Body Electronic: A Year with Microsoft on the Multimedia Frontier (Paperback)

THe best book! Makes you feel comfortable if you are new working in a software development job. And how software development basically involves dealing with different kinds of people. ANd all the extremes in personality of the programmer. It also describes the rare and challenging lifestyle that the programmer pursues and chooses...