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A programmer, Wallace was one of 11 people who in 1978 founded a new company in Albuquerque, New Mexico, called "Micro Soft". (The company moved to a small town outside Seattle and is now known as "Microsoft".) He left the software giant in 1983 to found Quicksoft. His PC-Write program was one of the first professional software packages to be marketed with a new concept called "Shareware". Copies could be freely made, but if people wanted a manual and support, they had to register it by paying a $75 fee. "If I make enough money to live on, I will continue the experiment," he said when the program was released. "If not, I will approach software publishers to see if they are interested in marketing a PC-Write II version of the program for me commercially." It was a success: Quicksoft eventually grew to $2 million in annual sales, and he sold the company to another early Microsoft employee. His 450 shares of Microsoft weren't worth much until 1986, when the company went public. After a number of stock splits, the 450 shares became more than 100,000 shares. He died September 20 in San Rafael, Calif., from unknown causes at age 53. From This is True for 22 September 2002 Suggestions for further reading:
 By: Mary Jo Foley List Price: $27.95 Amazon Price: $18.45 Editorial Review: Microsoft 2.0 is about Microsoft's future, not its past. The coming years will be challenging ones for the Redmond software kingpin. Many of the executives currently leading the Microsoft charge are likely to go their own way. Technology will continue to advance at a breakneck pace. Microsoft will forge deals of the size and scope it previously never envisioned in order to keep pace. Foley doesn't claim to possess a crystal ball, allowing her to predict flawlessly what Microsoft plans to do in the next few years or even few months. But based on the many Microsoft executives, partners, customers and competitors with whom she converses regularly, she is sitting in a good spot to make some fairly educated guesses that will be most interesting to her readers. This book describes the Microsoft people, products and strategies that will be key for the next-gen Microsoft. Foley uses her professional experience to piece the puzzle together in order to reveal a reasonable, educated guess as to what Microsoft 2.0 will look like as it enters the next decade and beyond.  By: James WallaceJim Erickson List Price: $17.95 Amazon Price: $12.21 Editorial Review: Hard Drive charts Gates's missteps as well as his successes: the failure of OS/2 and the embarrassing delays in bringing Windows to the marketplace; the highly publicized split with IBM, which then forged an alliance with Apple to battle Microsoft; the public relations fallout over various exploits of Gates; and the investigations by the Federal Trade Commission. Wallace and Erickson also examine the combative, often abrasive side of Gates's personality that has alienated many of Microsoft's rivals and even employees, and led to his being labeled "The Silicon Bully" by Business Month Magazine. They report: In the early 80's, Microsoft's Multiplan lost out to Lotus 1-2-3 in the marketplace. According to one Microsoft programmer, a few of the key people working on DOS 2.0 had a saying at the time that "DOS isn't done until Lotus won't run." They managed to code a few hidden bugs into DOS 2.0 that caused Lotus 1-2-3 to breakdown when it was loaded. "There were as few as three or four people who knew this was being done," the employee said. He felt the highly competitive Gates was the ringleader. The first two female executives hired at Microsoft in 1985 were recruited to meet federal affirmative action guidelines so that the company could qualify for a lucrative Air Force contract. One source says,"They would say, 'Well, let's hire two women because we can pay them half as much as we will have to pay a man, and we can give them all this other crap work to do because they are women.' That's directly out of Bill's mouth...." Gates treated one of these executives so badly that she asked to be transferred away from him. Microsoft managers used the company's e-mail system to secretly spy on employee work habits. Only those employees who worked weekends could collect bonuses. In time word got out and some employees logged into their e-mail on weekends with a modem from home so it would appear they had come in.The true story behind the rise of a tyrannical genius, how he  By: Anne Friedberg List Price: $34.95 Amazon Price: $22.72 Editorial Review: Honorable Mention, 2008 Katherine Singer Kovacs Book Award presented by the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. and 2007 Winner of the Phi Kappa Phi Faculty Recognition Award at University of Southern California. As we spend more and more of our time staring at the screens of movies, televisions, computers, and handheld devices--"windows" full of moving images, texts, and icons--how the world is framed has become as important as what is in the frame. In The Virtual Window, Anne Friedberg examines the window as metaphor, as architectural component, and as an opening to the dematerialized reality we see on the screen. In De pictura (1435), Leon Battista Alberti famously instructed painters to consider the frame of the painting as an open window. Taking Alberti's metaphor as her starting point, Friedberg tracks shifts in the perspectival paradigm as she gives us histories of the architectural window, developments in glass and transparency, and the emerging apparatuses of photography, cinema, television, and digital imaging. Single-point perspective--Alberti's metaphorical window--has long been challenged by modern painting, modern architecture, and moving-image technologies. And yet, notes Friedberg, for most of the twentieth century the dominant form of the moving image was a single image in a single frame. The fractured modernism exemplified by cubist painting, for example, remained largely confined to experimental, avant-garde work. On the computer screen, however, where multiple "windows" coexist and overlap, perspective may have met its end. In this wide-ranging book, Friedberg considers such topics as the framed view of the camera obscura, Le Corbusier's mandates for the architectural window, Eisenstein's opinions on the shape of the movie screen, and the multiple images and nested windows commonly displayed on screens today. The Virtual Window proposes a new logic of visuality, framed and virtual: an architecture not only of space but of time.  By: Suzanne TaylorKathy SchroederJohn Doerr List Price: $35.00 Amazon Price: $23.10 Editorial Review: The Exclusive Story behind Intuit's Hard-Won Success It's a modern-day David and Goliath story for the business world: a company dreamed up at a kitchen table, built on explosive PC growth, and forced to battle a giant in the race to revolutionize an industry. This is the story of Intuit, creator of renowned software products like Quicken, QuickBooks, and TurboTax-the company that beat mighty Microsoft and changed the way 25 million people manage their finances. Written by Intuit veteran Suzanne Taylor and seasoned business manager Kathy Schroeder-who were granted exclusive interviews with founder Scott Cook and other key figures- Inside Intuit tells this company's original and fascinating tale for the first time. The book vividly recounts each dramatic stage of Intuit's development: from initial conception to "bet the company" investments; from strokes of marketing genius to disastrous product launches; and from battles for survival to successive victories against arch-rival Microsoft-the company no one else could beat. Evident throughout this account is the power of Intuit's relentless customer focus, which guided the company from tiny start-up to a 6,000-employee, $1.4 billion business. Instructive and inspiring, Inside Intuit chronicles an enduring company's extraordinary success against overwhelming odds. "This important book doesn't take any shortcuts in analyzing the building blocks of success. Taylor and Schroeder have written a fascinating blow-by-blow account of the thousand and one decisions that have made Intuit what it is. Highly readable, thorough, and extremely well researched Inside Intuit is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand success in Silicon Valley." -Emanuel Rosen, author, The Anatomy of Buzz "Inside Intuit is more than the history of a start-up that grew to dominate a major software category. It is a blueprint of success for entrepreneurs and investors who want to build great businesses in difficult environments." -Roger McNamee, cofounder, Silver Lake Partners and Integral Capital Partners "Inside Intuit is a very entertaining book. Any entrepreneur at heart will enjoy and learn from the story of how Scott Cook and Tom Proulx faced so much adversity and came back from the brink of disaster to build a very successful, highly admired Silicon Valley company. Readers can learn many lessons from both Intuit's successes and mistakes. In the end, good ideas, hard work, determination, and strong values really do pay off!" -Dan Rudolph, Senior Associate Dean/Chief Operating Officer, Stanford Graduate School of Business "I was thrilled to read the inside story of how Intuit was born and raised. I've always admired Intuit's strict attention to customer needs and feedback. Now I have a much better idea of how that culture was created." -Stewart Alsop, General Partner, New Enterprise Associates "Inside Intuit offers readers the secrets behind that company's extraordinary success. The authors' insights into how Intuit trounced Microsoft alone are worth the price of the book!" -Andrea Butter, coauthor, Piloting Palm: The Inside Story of Palm, Handspring and the Birth of the Billion Dollar Handheld Industry  By: Anna Rowley List Price: $27.95 Amazon Price: $18.45 Editorial Review: Microsoft is well-known for being an intense place to work: employees face constant pressure to innovate and excel and are passionately devoted to their jobs. In this insightful book, Anna Rowley reveals the major problems all managers face and shows how to conquer them. She distills the characteristics every leader must have to succeed in a demanding environment, including belief, confidence, self-awareness, trust, power, and ambition. She provides the tools that have helped her clients to continue to attain their potential, while including fascinating case studies of the driven and talented clients she has worked with at Microsoft.Topics covered in Leadership Therapy include how to:* Communicate well, even with difficult colleagues* Negotiate power* Bridgethe gap between the real you and you, the leader* Manage change effectively* Establish trust among coworkers* Much more! |
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