I Sing the Body Electronic

What Hacker News says

1. pmytehAug 2019
   There is an entire book on the creation of Explorapedia, I sing the body electronic: A year with Microsoft on the multimedia frontier by Fred Moody (my copy is ISBN 0-340-64927-5). It's fascinating for its insights not only on the messiness of the design process, but also the process and deadline constraints that the team were working under (which feel like a general rather than a specific set of lessons).
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2. krylonDec 2018
   In Fred Moody's "I Sing The Body Electronic"[0], there is a passage where the author gets to read such postmortem documents and is surprised by the brutal honesty, but does not give any quotes. Now I see what he meant.

   [0] which I highly recommend, btw

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3. krylonJun 2018
   I can recommend "I Sing the Body Electronic: A Year with Microsoft on the Multimedia Frontier" by Fred Moody. It is pretty old, and I think it's been out of print for a while, but if you can get your hands on a copy, it is well worth the effort.

   It details the work of a team working on a children's encyclopedia, but it also gives some very interesting insights into Microsoft's corporate culture (of the early 1990s at least) and social dynamics.

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4. krylonDec 2017
   Not sure if it fits your bill, but I found "I Sing The Body Electronic" by Fred Moody a very interesting read.

   Moody was able to get some pretty intimate insights into the development of a software product at Microsoft at the beginning of the 1990s (1992-1993, I think).

   I was surprised to learn afterwards that Moody had (has?) a reputation for being very pro-Microsoft; this book does not embellish the problems the people on the project team face, nor their conflicts.

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5. krylonJan 2016
   There is a very interesting book, "I Sing The Body Electronic" by Fred Moody, who had the opportunity to observe a team at Microsoft very intimately over the course of a project. Back then, apparently part of the problem was that good managers were very rare, and as the company grew and grew, they put people in management positions that were not really qualified for (or comfortable with) the job.

   Deadlines appear to have been a problem back then, as well.

   I have wondered, how much of that has changed since. From your description, not much... :(

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6. krylonMay 2015
   A couple of years back I was lucky enough to get a copy of Fred Moody's "I Sing The Body Electronic" for cheap. It is fairly old, obviously, but it was a very interesting read.

   (The problems it describes are slightly different from the ones you or the blog post describe, but not totally unrelated, either.)

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