For a book that came out in 1996 it is very prophetic at times!

This book is one of my all-time favorites, a bildungsroman of the techie world set between its two 1990s axes: Microsoft and Silicon Valley. My friends hear me make quips from this book far too often, perhaps my favorite being "Microsoft hired 3000 people last year and you know not all of them were gems."

The quick summary is: boy goes to work for Microsoft, boy leaves Microsoft for startup in Silicon Valley, and lives and learns as he and his friends -- his coworkers -- struggle to ship product. But it's not about the technology, and it's not about the business.

The technical aspects of the plot (such as it is) were laughable then and even more ridiculous now, but the dreams and aspirations and the surreality of life in both places -- and ages, as the characters grope through their 20's and growing up -- come through clearly. The book is an odd mixture of straightforward events, weird vignettes, and stream of consciousness observation of the totems and symbols of this weird, weird world, and somehow it works.

I can't tell you if this is really a good book, though, because I spent time at Microsoft in the early 1990's and I was a 20-something then and I moved to Silicon Valley in the late 1990's and this book just got it -- it understood what it meant to be in this weird culture and this weird place and this weird age where anything could happen if you just worked hard enough and you let your health go to hell and you got to be in on one-point-oh (1.0). It might be less a novel of growth for our times than a historical artifact, capturing that experience that was the 90s, or it might just be the novel that somehow captured my life.

All I know is that I keep reading it again and again and I still think it's good.

I pick books based on exactly what I need at that moment and therefore I love every book I pick. This felt like reading Fight Club with one eye and watching Halt and Catch Fire with the other. I had a really nice time reading this book. I'm infected with its earnest pithy tone!

From Microserfs: I don't want to lose you. I can't imagine ever feeling this strongly about anything or anybody ever again. This was unexpected, my soul's connection to you. You stole my loneliness. No one knows that I was wishing for you, a thief, to enter my house of autonomy, that I had locked my doors but my Windows were open, hoping, but not believing, you would enter.

I think that sums up how fabulous this book is.

Although this book is of its time, there is a high nostalgia factor here, at least for me, especially as I was nearly the same age as the author when he was writing in 1995. The story of several software developers in the middle 90s who form a kind of surrogate family and look for meaning in their lives is far from the experiences with which I was familiar, but the milieu is the same. And by that I mean the culture of the time rather than the place. What makes this different from, say, a film like Reality Bites (1994) is the ever-present questioning among these young code-writers of the changing relationship between humanity and technology. In that regard, and in his faithfulness to the reality of the period, Douglas Coupland, in a hundred years, may look like Emile Zola does to us now.

This is a very optimistic book, which also seems--looking back on it--to fit with the time. It isn't as if there weren't plenty of scary things still in existence during the period of 1993-2001, but in general there was a different feel to life than there is today. Or, again, so it seems to me. But I'm not in my twenties anymore either--things would probably look different to me now if I was 25.

Anyway...very enjoyable--the short snippet paragraph style may not be to everyone's taste, but it makes for a deceptively breezy read. If young adults had trouble deciding what their life meant in 1995, I can only imagine the trouble they're having nowadays. Whippersnappers.

I much preferred JPod, but that is also closer to being of my generation.

In Italia è uscito nel '98 (quando usciva windows 98), il libro è del '95 (quando usciva windows 95), io l'ho letto solo nel 2007 (quando è uscito windows vista, almeno per i comuni mortali).
È troppo fico, ha cambiato il mio modo di vedere le cose. O almeno ha rifertilizzato il mio sguardo. Molto pop, molto tecno-geek (per apprezzarlo appieno bisogna essere programmatori, e di quelli che seguono diversi aspetti dell'informatica da qualche annetto... direi almeno venticinque!), molto post-industriale, molto post-umanista. Per molti aspetti mi ricorda Clerks, il film di Kevin Smith che, guarda caso, è uscito proprio nel '94 (non mi sembra che siano usciti sistemi operativi di Microsoft, in quell'anno: infatti l'aspetto tecno-geek lì manca!); anche se in Microservi non c'è nessuna compiacenza verso il turpiloquio (non che sia da me criticarne l'uso; Kevin Smith lo sa usare, il turpiloquio).
Mi ricorda anche Pattern Recognition (in Italia uscito con un titolo grottescamente fuorviante come L'accademia dei sogni; sigh... sigh! sigghissimo!!!) di William Gibson, dove la peculiarità della protagonista consiste nell'avere una "sensibilità patologica nei confronti dei marchi aziendali" (sto citando pedissequamente il riassunto in copertina: per una volta ci hanno azzeccato). Ve lo consiglio, lo troverete interessante anche se non dovesse piacervi.
Coupland è un genio, Microservi uno dei libri migliori che abbia mai letto. Riesce a invogliarti a dare uno sguardo diverso a qualsiasi cosa. Il mondo si arricchisce di sfumature inedite: il sacchetto di patatine che tieni tra le mani diventa un manufatto sciamanico, il fumetto più sgangherato l'oggetto di culti interspaziali, e i Lego sono i mattoncini con cui dio ha costruito l'universo. Senza menate religiose e/o spiritualiste, intendiamoci.

It's like Big Bang Theory. Except it's funny. And insightful. And well written.

So, nothing like Big Bang Theory.

Microserfs by Douglas Coupland
Nine out of 10


Microserfs is included on The Guardian 1,000 Books Everyone Must Read list - https://www.theguardian.com/books/200... - that I find very interesting for most of the books I have read recently come from it and have been entertaining, captivating, rewarding and worthwhile.

Douglas Coupland is an excellent, modern, imaginative, amusing – in fact, looking to see where the book is placed on the aforementioned list, I thought it could be in the comedy section, but found it under the State of the nation label, which it deserves.
Microserfs deals with one of the most – if not the most – important issues faced by millennials and all the rest of the world, in our journey towards Singularity, the way we deal with technology, the tech giants FANGs and their Chinese rivals, the BATs, seeing as the novel is about the relationship employees have with these new colossus, satirized and evident in the title- Serfs of Microsoft...

Going beyond this title, the figure of Bill Gates, only called Bill in the book, does not strike the reader as the mean, villainous character who is oppressing the multitudes that work for him – although this was first published in a short story format and this reader writes about an abridged version of the novel by the way – and the contrast between the generous, benign multibillion donor that tries to solve problems like malaria and disease in the world is not so blatant.
Daniel is the narrator who works for “Bill” as one of the Microserfs and he is a nerd, an employee that has to climb on the ladder, is much younger than the average age at the company – which is at the time of the plot of about 31 – and he is very entertaining with his jocularity that mocks the fact that for instance they can no longer mention death, for while once there where only very young on campus, a vice president has had cancer and died recently.

The main character – and so many other geeks like him – is mainly concerned with the “product”, being hired to test the software and identify bugs and breaks, a sort of preliminary stage, but with a lot of potential – Abe, one of the members of the initial team, would point out the brilliant perspectives offered by the company that has been listed only very recently as the biggest independent firm in the world, only to be surpassed by Apple and amazon later.

When Michael, a talented, entrepreneurial, brave, creative, intrepid programmer launches what is called today a “startup”, a new technology company, he invites all the members of his Microsoft team to join him and benefit from a higher pay package – one is surprised to hear figures which are as low as twenty five thousand dollars for…a whole year, when today that is not enough for a month, in Silicon Valley, but we have to think about inflation and more importantly, the rocketing costs in the region – The Economist has had an article in which they argued that more companies will use other regions, given the prohibitive, stratospheric prices in that paradisiacal – in the past – technological dreamland.
All the team joins him, with the exception of Abe, more conscious than the rest of the benefits of working for the Feudal Landlord as serfs and the perils of launching into the unknown, however promising the new code written by Michael could be and the attraction of working with Susan, Todd, bug Barbecue, Karla – people who share a passion for writing code, but with different personalities, sexual orientation and tastes.

Daniel starts a relationship with Karla, which experiences the inevitable ups and downs – he forgets the one month anniversary once, then they have other disagreements, but this is one sunny side in the life of the hero, who has some other, bigger problems connected with his parents – in the first place, his father, who has worked for IBM – a company with a rather negative image it seems, at the time when this story takes place – and is losing his job at the age of fifty and is offered a bizarre position by Michael, who shares a hobby with the older man, involving toy trains.
Bug Barbecue has a nickname based on his occupation at Microsoft, and he lives in the same “geek house” like the others, where he has an outré worshipping altar for Elle Macpherson, with sufficient photos and paraphernalia to make the supermodel freak if she were ever to see it, but later in the narrative, the same man gathers the group to say he had been “inning it for too long and he now has to out it, for he is…gay, contrary to what that religious construction would have said.

Susan seems to be one other peculiar character, in that she seems to be very determined, perhaps exaggerating a certain aggressiveness to hide weaknesses and a feeling of uncertainty, only to find a vocation when she launches a feminist group destined for women code writers – members of this community would have to have a vagina and a number of shared beliefs and traits – and she is invited on CNN and becomes a celebrity.
While hearing the abridged audio version of this novel. I was wondering how much inspiration the creators of Silicon Valley could have had from Microserfs, because even after just a few episodes seen, it looks like the community in there shares many traits with the group that worked as serfs and then launched into the wilderness in Microserfs.

The book is excellent and contains many interesting facts, political commentary, references to Apple, Nintendo and others, including the revelation that humanity has reached the point where the books, information available has surpassed the total brain capacity of mankind, one vital step towards what the nerds know better and call Singularity.

Uggh! As I type this review from my HP laptop on a hazy Sunday afternoon in Campbell, CA, I am reminded of 80s comedian Dennis Miller. You remember SNL cast member Dennis Miller? He's the snarky, pop-culture referencing smart ass that is funny in small doses, but grows tiresome quickly. With a pompous, look-at-all-the-esoteric-details-I-can-spew-out-in-rapid-fire-bursts pseudo-hip/intellectual flair, Miller consumes all the oxygen in a room and returns minutia and a few chuckles.

Coupland's band of geeks in "Microserf" are riding the first wave of the Internet boom circa 1993. They leave the safety of their Microsoft gigs and head south for the challenge of launching a Silicon Valley multimedia game startup. The migration is mostly a plot device from which Coupland can deliver a contrast between the Microsoft and Silicon Valley cultures. The sentimental story, and way overly sentimental story at that, is a loose fabric from which Coupland can tell a few nerd jokes and conduct an anthropological study of geek cultures in the two epicenters. Coupland fills the pages with inconsequential locale and technology references in order to time-stamp his findings. More than 25 years later, this time-capsule is opened and the items founds are painstakingly cataloged and documented. The time-capsule finder is bored with the 1993 references, whether to music, programming language, Silicon Valley restaurants and programming languages. So much of the content is inconsequential and uninteresting.

The book is told from the 1st person point-of-view of one of the geek programmers. It is in journal format. His entries are filled with dialog of conversations that are not credible, pranks that aren't funny, geek culture that isn't interesting, and technology references that aren't necessary. "As I Powerbook this entry..." is a favorite starting point for a journal entry. It's hard to tell if Coupland is mocking the geek narrator, truly thinks that is natural geek-language or simply wants to keep track of the technology being used at the particular time-period. In any event, the references get in the way of any natural rhythm and makes for cringy, annoying scenes.

The characters are ridiculous caricatures. The band of nerds encompasses a half-dozen or so geek archetypes from which Coupland can catalog and classify. Insert laugh-track here as he describes the Spock-like mating rituals of the "Michael" character. Relationships are one-dimensional and romanticized. The scenes are either banal or ridiculous.

I moved to Sunnyvale in 1993. Many of the stores, restaurants and technology references are accurate. That being said, all the local references and technology mentions does not produce excitement and nostalgia. Instead, Coupland's needless mentions prove extraneous and pedantic all these years later. There are some laughs and even prescient predictions of technology and business trends. Wrapped in this delivery package of unrealistic sentimentality and nerd-culture riffing, the effort falls short. It is more annoying than enlightening. Coupland is not a dumb guy, nor for that matter is Miller. They are quite talented in their own way. The trouble is that they try too hard to showcase their knowledge and wit. We feel trapped in an unprompted, one-sided dialog onslaught and pray for a pause in the inane chatter so we can escape to safer and more consequential grounds.

Those are my thoughts as I finalize this review on my HP Windows 10 laptop from my preferred Google Chrome browser on this Amazon-owned Goodreads review site, which I will now post with a click of my wireless, optical Logitech mouse on this 26th day of the year 2020.

I first read this novel in 1996 just after it was published. Twelve years later and in a new century, it is disturbing to read how much of this is still relatively realistic. It is almost as though the organisational arrangements and lifestyles described have been adopted both as a management and lifestyle model and transplanted, at least in part, around the world.
This book was funny in 1996 when it seemed in part a satirical comment on the new world of geeks and technology. Now it seems more ironic. Many of those for whom this was an accurate depiction of life in the 1990s are still caught in this time warp. The tragedy is that so many others have joined them.
If you have not already read this novel and wondered about the design of a working world in which human interaction through technology has largely replaced direct human interaction: the time is right. After all, in reading this review you are relying on the technology developed by geeks and nerds.

Microserfs is a blast from the past, since I'm reading it in 2019. Which reminds me sharply of my time at Accenture (then Andersen Consulting) around that time in 1994, around that age (31) too. Much of the delayed coming of age of the techies at Bill tech monolith could be have been copied from my own life and work at that time. It gave my also some insights by way of hindsight in a way I had not expected to happen this late in life.
Sadly I never made the jump to be in a start-up like described in this novel disguised as a diary. Luckily I found love and had a little family which made me a more happy person then I was before.
Like the other contemporary works of Coupland, this one also seems very dated reading it 25 years later. Because of the heart warming and hopeful content. I can still recommend it today, even if the newer generation does not mass-produce nerdy drones like they did in the 80's and 90's anymore.