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"Even as they wrestle with forces that threaten to tear them apart, Cutler and his team feverishly hunt for computing's Holy Grail." -- Showstopper! Cover Blurb
Showstopper! is not nearly as bad as you would expect from its gaudy cover art and even more sensationalist cover blurbs. But it's not anywhere as good as it could have been, and should have been. Zachary spent considerable time with dozens of the participants on the NT development team and apparently had almost unrestricted access to the team's offices, meetings, and memos. He cornered the notoriously press-averse Cutler and the equally reticent Maritz for hours of interviews. He sat in the build lab and watched the modules straggle in. In other words, the means, the motive, and the opportunity were definitely at hand -- but just as with Helen Custer's equally unsatisfactory Inside Windows NT, the correct author for the job was lacking.
Zachary does not appear to have any real grasp of the key issues in designing and building an operating system, where NT fits into the overall lineage of operating systems, or how NT relates to its direct competitors OS/2, Novell Netware, or UNIX. There is no evidence in the book that he tried to put the story into context by interviewing people outside of Microsoft. He is content to mindlessly parrot the Microsoft party line on the Great Divorce with IBM, and to relay Microsoft propaganda about how Windows NT is the most complex program ever written.
Consequently, Zachary's portrayals of the key players and events in the Windows NT project are shallow and unconvincing. Good intentions are necessary but not sufficient -- he just doesn't have the industry perspective or the technical expertise that he needs to back up his writing. The work that consumes the lives of the NT developers is as remote to Zachary as the mountains of Mars. This is rather like an tone-deaf author who can't even read music setting out to write a biography of Mozart. From such an author, you'll only learn about what Mozart likes to eat, which newspaper he reads, and how he fights with his wife and forgets to pay his bills.
For example, Zachary portrays David Cutler in Wall Street Journal shorthand as a sort of Clint Eastwood of Redmond, a cowboy of coding, a divorce-prone misfit, a borderline maniac who puts his fist through walls, likes to drive fast cars, and bullies his team members. Having interviewed Cutler myself, read some of his programs and documentation, and worked for years with the DEC PDP-11 RSX-11M operating system which Cutler created essentially singlehandedly, it seems to me that the most fascinating aspects of Cutler are exactly the ones that are missing from this account.
It's astonishing that Macmillan would go to this amount of trouble to publish a mass-market hardcover book about the development of Windows NT. I suppose every publisher dreams of having another Soul of a New Machine on their backlist. But books like that don't happen by accident.
-- Ray Duncan
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Explanation of ERCB rating scale: No stars = unacceptable, 1 Star = marginal, 2 Stars = average, 3 Stars = above average, 4 Stars = exceptional.