Talk:The Soul of a New Machine

movie?

The book cover mentions a forthcoming 'movie' - what became of that, or was it just hype ? MikeW

They were talking about it for a while. I remember because I was in seventh grade (I'm Tom West's daughter) and the idea of having someone play your dad in a MOVIE was an amazing thing to think about, but for one reason or another the project was shelved. Jessamyn (talk) 15:43, 29 April 2007 (UTC)

canard

Removed this: One side effect of the book was to popularize throughout the computer world the term canard, which had been in-house slang at Data General, with the meaning "mistaken and confused belief".

In fact, canard is an English word dating to the mid-19th century. It comes from the French 'canard' meaning hoax. Saagpaneer (talk) 16:40, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

It's got a computer slang meaning as well which is cited in the book and appropriate. I'll add a page number cite for it. Jessamyn (talk) 18:17, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

exploitation?

We spent a fair amount of time on this book during my MBA. Though I found the read fascinating on its own merits (hats off to your dad, Jess), perhaps the most poignant subtext was how the story is used both as a "how-to-motivate-employees" leadership tutorial **AND** as "beware-of-coercive-management" cautionary material for labor-unions. Maybe we could work some of this double-sided interpretation, which (I would say from my read) is emphasized within the text? Sskoog (talk) 17:59, 11 July 2014 (UTC)

• There are a few org theory works which reference Soul with respect to managing teams through intrinsic motivation and friendly competition, but many of them do in passing. I'd be interested to read a paper which took Kidder's book as a case study and examined the outcomes. Protonk (talk) 19:25, 11 July 2014 (UTC)

Bag on the side...

Wasn't this about the compromises made for backward compatibility, not "having it completed more quickly"? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2600:1700:5B70:26C0:0:0:0:18 (talk) 04:22, 8 February 2022 (UTC) The claim in the entry that they were designing a "bag to put on the side of the Eclipse" meant that they were "turning out an inferior product to have it completed more quickly" is incorrect. Even worse, it misses what the entire book is about. Did the authors of this entry actually read the book? Or ask design engineers from this period of time what this meant? I doubt it.

What the engineers were saying is that management wanted a solution, no matter how ugly or inelegant. That is what "to put a bag on the side of [something]" meant back in the early 1980s. To have it done quickly was frequently a management objective, but an inferior product was never acceptable. That was guaranteed to lose customers, market share, and generate lower profit margins.

As a chip designer in the early 1980s, to "put a bag on the side" of something meant that whatever it was, it was an inelegant solution, something ugly that was "stuck on" to whatever the original thing was to fix or improve the original thing. More often than not, to do an elegant fix always seemed to involved throwing away the original design completely and re-designing whatever completely from scratch in an elegant way. As a comparison apropos to the time, the Motorola 68000 was considered an elegant design, and the Intel 80286 was considered to be an 8086 with a bag on the side to extend the 8086's design. The Motorola 68000 in comparison was not an extended Motorola 6800. For reference the 68000, 6800, 80286, and 8086 were microprocessor chip of that era.

In short, "to put a bag on the side of [something]" means to use an ugly, inelegant solution to make something appear better than it really is or to fix a problem with the original thing. The engineers' complaint is that they are asked to do a quick-and-dirty fix for the Eclipse, no matter how ugly it is: "they (management) want us to put a bag on the side of the Eclipse".

I still have that book on my shelves...

The first entry in Stack Exchange confirms the above suggested meaning, and not the entry's claimed meaning. Where's the reference(s) for the meaning as claimed in the entry?

The Eclipse was generally a losing product compared to the VAX, and DG's management wanted a quick fix, and they didn't care how ugly it was. Carrellk (talk) 22:01, 25 September 2022 (UTC)

References