Jeeem's CinePad presents
A feature born of bitter experience:
Understanding
Microsoft
The four essential texts
Everything you think you know about Microsoft is wrong.
The public image of Microsoft is so out of synch with
the reality of the place
that it is the source of great merriment to those who actually work in Redmond.
So many of the Microsoft myths -- including the image of Bill Gates as Visionary
Übernerd --
are either clever exaggerations or just laughably untrue,
the result of years of PR efforts by Waggener-Edstrom,
who control all media access to the corporate behemoth.
Now, you could go on living in your fantasy world.
Or you could read these books and gain insight into
what the US's "most valuable" company* is
really like...
(Specific examples -- from the texts
themselves and parallel experiences from my three and a half years
at Microsoft, will be available in this space real soon...)
| 1 | 2 |
 Learn more Buy it now Kafka basically wrote the story of the 20th century right here, capturing the nightmarish frustration we all feel in the face of that malevolent monster known as bureaucracy.
|
 Learn more Buy it now The term has entered the language (a description of a bureacratic oxymoron, you might say) and its growing like Bill Gates' booty in Redmond, Washington. |
| 3 | 4 |
 Learn more Buy it now Scott Adams definitely has sources at The Borg. |
 Learn more Buy it now An ex-developer and the daughter of Microsoft's PR guru give the first account of what it's actually like in the trenches, and demonstrate how many huge blunders a company with billions in assets and no debt can afford to make. But (until now), you never heard about those... |
| * Stock market value, or "market capitalization," which is "a company's share price multiplied by its number of shares outstanding." Figures from Allan Sloan's article "Bragging Rights: The most 'valuable' company? Microsoft" in Newsweek, July 27, 1998. Page 35 |
