Boardroom Sadomasochism
Fred Moody spent a year with a Microsoft development team working on a multimedia kids' encyclopedia. His account is a chronicle of business indecision, technical delays and personnel disasters. The author continually expresses his perplexity at the disparity between Microsoft's reputation for ruthless efficiency and the actuality of high-pressure disorganization.
"I Sing the Body Electronic" makes ideal companion reading to "The Road Ahead." Readers lulled by Gates' cool, easygoing tone will want to pay attention to Moody's blow-by-blow account of one of Gates' legendary conference-room tantrums:
Gates nearly always reduces his audiences to wretchedness.... A group developing software to drive network printers once got no more than two minutes into a presentation I was watching before Gates started shouting.... "Ah, they think that's the best way... Well, they're just wrong! That's the silliest thing I've ever heard!" From then on, his interjections were constant: "It's nonsense!"; "This bullshit thing with no definition"; "This is where you guys have really gotten confused, okay?"; "Let's just say there were never any printers! Wouldn't that be nice? We could actually make money on this work!""The Road Ahead's" CD-ROM might be a lot more valuable -- as well as entertaining -- if, instead of offering dull commentary on the digital future, it recorded such moments of boardroom sadomasochism in gory detail.
