Discussion Questions
In a sense, this session takes us away from the Internet. It explores the
development of the PC industry through the 1980s and early 1990s through its
most important company: Microsoft. This stream is largely separate from the
development of the internet until 1995, at which point Microsoft and the
Internet meet with a bang.
- As we see from both readings, Microsoft has a very distinctive corporate
culture. What was unusual about it? Would you like to work there? How
important do you think Bill Gate's personality really was?
- How was this shaped by its origins in the personal computer world of the
mid-1970s? Which parts of the hacker spirit flourished at Microsoft, and which
parts withered?
- Why was Microsoft so profitable in the 1980s? Did it foresee the future
better than its competitors? What was the result of making so many programmers
rich?
- There's also a lot made in both readings of the differences between IBM
and Microsoft. What were they? How important do you think they were?
- Microserfs is set almost 15 years after Soul of a New Machine. Are the
coders at Microsoft different from the engineers at Data General?
- Within a year or two Coupland's book coming out, internet startups such as
Yahoo, Excite and Netscape had largely replaced Microsoft as popular examples
of cutting edge technology firms. How do you think the Microsoft story might
have influenced people's expectations for these new firms? (Think of
investors, journalists, employees, managers).
Resources
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Not as much on the web as you might think about the history of Microsoft.
Seems like whatever it is that motivates people to build fan pages works much
better for Apple and the producers of hardware. The firm has posted its own,
quite informative,
history of
its involvement with the web. There are also a lot of books about Microsoft.
Seems like most of the books ever written about software companies are about
Microsoft. Seems like most of the books ever written about people in the
computer industry are about Bill Gates. I mean a lot.
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The pile of good books on either topic is much smaller. The most interesting
one is a Soul of a New Machine style ethnographic account of Microsoft culture
and politics in action. Fred Moody, I Sing the Body Electronic: A Year with
Microsoft on the Multimedia Frontier, Viking, 1995. It's not quite as engrossing
as Kidder's book, but it really gets inside the company. Its also interesting
because it covers the market for multimedia CD-ROMS, a genre that vanished
without trace in about 1997 after enormous investments of hype and money on the
part of the publishing and software industry. The most popular of the Gates
biographies is the relatively early and rather negative James Wallace & Jim
Erickson, Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of Microsoft, Harperbusiness,
1993.
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There are also a host of books and articles on the firm's more recent legal
problems, but that falls outside the scope of this class.
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TNT produced a mildly entertaining version of the Gates/Jobs feud in their
1999 TV movie
Pirates
of Silicon Valley.
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If you want to read Gate's own thoughts on the future, you'll have to give
him more of your money to buy his book
"The Road Ahead." Its his attempt to do the visionary thing, which ever since
Steve Jobs has been required from any computer industry leader. In the original
version, published in 1995, he forgot to mention the Internet -- hence the rapid
publication of a revised version.
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