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

Electronic News, Oct 30, 1995 by Fred Moody

Fred Moody. I Sing the Body Electronic: A Year with Microsoft on the Multimedia Frontier. New York. Viking, 1995. pp. 311. $23.95.

Toward the end of a harrowing year of product development at Microsoft, several staff members explained why they had decided to stay with the company.

Kevin Gammill, the key software development engineer who was earning under $50,000 a year at Microsoft, turned down a $100,000 job offer from another firm; he was slated for a step up on the career ladder.

Craig Bartholomew, who had been unit head on the planned children's encyclopedia code-named Sendak, declined an offer from another company because, he said, "They have to cut corners to save production costs. You never have to do that here." (Besides, there were those stock options.)

Tom Corddry, general manager of Microsoft Multimedia Publishing, had almost been divorced as a result of the pressure to complete the Sendak project. Yet, as for thousands of well-compensated Microsoft employees, money had nothing to do with his staying on afterwards in a creative director position. He recalled someone saying that all those who work at Microsoft "above a certain level are volunteers. Because they're rich." Meaning, they could easily leave the stress behind and retire. But they stay on for the next assignment because no other company in the still-exploding software industry can match the excitement, the intelligence level of the staff, the millions of dollars that Microsoft is willing to spend up front to be first in developing new products, and finally, the thrill of helping to produce a product that makes such a strong "impact on the world." Need I mention Windows 95?

This inside look at one year in the life of Microsoft's multimedia division opens with a vivid description of the cave-like office of Gammill, "a boyish 25-year-old" whose profanity-laden outbursts and eccentric work habits make him one of the more colorful personalities on the Sendak team. Of course, the most charismatic character of all is the chairman of the board and CEO Bill Gates, who co-founded the company (with Paul Allen) in 1975. In spite of Microsoft's huge growth, Gates maintains a hands-on management style, overseeing all products with a minimal bureaucracy between himself and the staff. In fact, the author's descriptions of the staff's terrifying "Bill meetings" seem hilarious to those of us who are safe from the chairman's shrewd questions, quicksilver temper tantrums, merciless grillings, and humiliating put-downs. Nevertheless, employees' feelings of awe and fear ultimately turn into admiration, for Gates' combination of technological and business genius has propelled Microsoft into the stratosphere of billion-dollar corporate earnings.

The author was assured by staff members that the pressure-cooker atmosphere he observed during his year as a "fly on the wall" was common. If this is so, Fred Moody's dissection of the day-to-day process of producing just one multimedia program on compact disc makes Microsoft's success seem like a miracle. "From almost the beginning," he writes, "I believed that I was indeed observing an object lesson in how not to develop a product."

Moody, a staff writer for the Seattle Weekly, has been writing about the software business in general for about 15 years, and has covered Microsoft since its inception. He begins this account on Dec. 17, 1992, a few months before the Encarta multimedia encyclopedia "hit the marketplace." While the Encarta developers are still working at a fever pitch, the design team for its junior version, Sendak, is already assembled. Prophetically, Moody comments that "It is clear from the discussion that...production will pose significant and possibly insurmountable problems."

Technological problems are to be expected in transforming highly creative design ideas into a computer program that can be easily run by children ages 7 to 11. What makes this book an instructive text for any business manager is its depiction of personnel conflicts and executive pressures that hindered decision-making and prevented the team members from meeting necessary deadlines. Moody makes us well-acquainted with the youthful and highly talented designers, artists, developers, and project managers--almost all under 30--who comprised the Sendak team. Interestingly, on this project at least, "an enormous cultural chasm stretched between developers and designers at Microsoft." For one thing, designers come from the arts field; developers from math and science backgrounds. For another, the two groups apparently break up along gender lines: designers are female, developers, male. Designers develop the grand vision, the "wish list," and developers tell them what can't be done. The result is conflict, with what the author sees as typically gender-based response differences. (Calling Deborah Tanner, author of two books on communication between the sexes).

Attempts to resolve conflicts and move the project forward take place at meeting after meeting, several of them in a distraction-free "retreat" setting at off-campus sites. (Readers who feel bogged down in too many unproductive business meetings will find it worthwhile to ponder Moody's detailed analyses of these meetings.) Looming over the entire enterprise from its inception is the mandate to ship the product by its scheduled date--a date set before any of the multitudinous design or development details are in place. Gates' philosophy, as articulated by Tom Corddry, is to begin with a date, "to put a preview product out there early, and potentially become established as the owner of the category...The value of being first rather than best, Corddry reminds his troops, was too much a part of Microsoft's culture ever to be questioned."