Rating: 
Summary: Bill binds us all
Review: For all the secret admirers of Bill this is a must read book. The story of a Microsoft programmer on the Microsoft campus is great stuff and really funny too. It tells about the culture within the company at the beginning of the nineties. Those were the days a lot of the older employees vested their stocks and became miljonair over night. Unfortunately the main character in Microserfs is not one of those. But he doesn't really care, I guess he just likes his work. This changes when he gets a girlfriend. Then he likes his work and also something else. What binds the characters on the campus is not their work but the unconditional worship of their hero Bill. All in all Microserfs is a true product of the nineties and computer people really should try it.
Rating: 
Summary: Fluff and Frivolous
Review: Coupland's style has never really impressed me much. But, I always given someone a second chance. Contrary to many critics, Coupland reliance, or better yet - dependence, on popular culture is not symbolic or metaphoric of a generation. Instead, Coupland style dripples from one stereotyped flat character to another with little or no substance. His lack of any creative flavor puts Microseft right up there with an E! Entertainment programming. Coupland failed to even study accurate basics of the individual cultures that are supposively present in his characters. Most of his settings are sophmoric and naive, like someone who wrote this book from reading generalized Wired magazines about nerds and Microsoft. In the end he tries to push all of these broken elements together in order to have his poorly construed characters obtain enlightenment. It is amazing what they will publish today. I would not recommend this book to anyone I like.
Rating: 
Summary: Fantastic
Review: If I were going to write a book, it would come out sounding like this. This book bursts with the life of its characters and their thoughts, feelings, and actions. It is aimed very specifically at white middle-class people who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s and are computer literate, which means that if you don't fall into that category, you might not enjoy it as much. Still, anyone can enjoy the casual, lifelike style of the narrator, who purportedly wrote this book down in his PowerBook as a way to help him sleep. It won't put you to sleep because it's too funny and compelling.
Rating:
Summary: Can love change lives?
Review: Microserfs is about geek culture, but more than that, it's about love, love that changes people's lives (or even *gives* them lives). It follows a group of programmers as they leave Microsoft and start their own company, commenting on their love lives, their relationships with their families (real and assumed), and, of course, the thousands of pop culture references they spout off daily. I initially thought I was going to give the book a much lower rating than I did, as the "big change" that I thought the book was about occurs fairly early, and it's hard to see any huge themes for much of the book. However, the last chapter is heartbreakingly beautiful, and it even made me cry. Microserfs is a lovely book, and of interest to anyone who believes love can change the world, or, of course, geeks.
Rating:
Summary: A sweet book about friendship.
Review: While hiding under the guise of being about geek life in the 90s, Microserfs is at its heart a book about friendships. There are lots of geeky, computer tecky passages some which seem quite outdated only a few years after its publication, but the actual story is not about life at Microsoft at all. Instead it tells the story of Dan, a computer programmer who in the beginning of the novel has no life outside that of Microsoft. Through Dan's journal entries we see his life unfold into one rich with friends and family. Aside from all the kitchy pop culture references and nerd speak this is a very touching and sweet book.
Rating:
Summary: Kerouac of the Coding Generation
Review: This is the definitive book for the technology generation. Coding addiction instead of codeine addiction. It's gonna do what Kerouac did for the Beatniks. The last few pages are the most unconventional and touching prose I've ever read. Long live emoticons! No one has the geeks covered than Douglas Coupland.
Rating: 
Summary: Readable, but Overdone.
Review: This book's amusing, especially at first. After about fifty pages, I found the sophomoric metaphysics and self-important view of programming to be more than a bit self-indulgent. It's totally Gen-X centered, but I guess that figures, given that Coupland introduced the term in another book. Written as a diary, it follows a programmer for Microsoft who uproots with his group house gang and moves to the Bay Area. You'll get a lot of musing about cars favored in Seattle vs. the Bay Area as well as the Gap. Costco is prominent, as are legos, the Mac, etc. The book should be loads of fun. Even lots of Star Trek references. But it just doesn't ring true, either technically or in terms of the VC-driven world of startups. If you want a good book of fiction on programmers, check out Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. If you want pop references, read anything by Stephen King. If you want silicon valley hype and stories about venture capitalists, read Michael Lewis's non-fiction New New Thing. If you want to read about marketing high tech, read Gordon Moore's non-fiction Crossing the Chasm. Spoiler Warning: This book has the worst ending of any book I've read in recent memory.
Rating:
Summary: Interesting but too fluffy
Review: I've heard lots of geeks enthusiastically recommend this book, but I found it entirely lacking in meaningful content. Additionally, the characters' traits were overdone combinations of all the worst, most extreme characteristics of many "geeks." Basically, too much fluff and not enough content.
Rating: 
Summary: YES, WELL, YOU GEEKS ARE AN ODD BLEND OF DOORS AND BRAKES.
Review: WOULDN'T IT BE SCARY IF OUR INTERNAL CLOCKS WEREN'T SET TO RHYTHMS OF WAVES AND SUNRISE OR EVEN THE INDUSTRIAL WHISTLE TOOT BUT TO PRODUCT CYCLES INSTEAD? "Funny how all those things you thought would never end turned out to be the first to vanish-IBM, the Reagans, Eastern bloc Communism. As you get older, the bottom line becomes to survive as best you can." -"It's your world now... it's yours." Douglas Coupland is popular with my generation, most likely because he makes keen observations about life from a perspective people of the X Generation can understand and relate to. Heck he must be the expert since he coined the term "Generation X". However, he also must appeal to the ME ME ME IT'S ALL ABOUT ME self-centredness that is a part of the nature of most people of this generation. Also it must appeal to their short attention spans and complete irreverence toward just about everything. I recognise that this is a generalisation, and I am not condemning Coupland nor his fans. I am simply saying that Coupland's writing style is idiosyncratic and definitely has one target audience. I read his earlier works, and I enjoyed them more or less, but there is a quality to Coupland's writing that seems very surface and artificial despite his astute and timely observations about people and things. Coupland is genuinely witty in his writing, but most of the time I find that he tries too hard. What I mean by this is that he overreaches for authenticity. For example, in Microserfs, he writes about how he went shopping at the Uwajimaya on 156th in Bellevue. Locals will be impressed that he knows his stuff and people from outside of the greater Bellevue/Redmond/Eastside area will be impressed with his knowledge, or maybe his imagination if they don't know that Uwajimaya is really on 156th in Bellevue. The problem for me, though, is that these little things just go too far by a tiny amount that just push these references right over the thin line of what is clever and what is trying too hard. Maybe just Uwajimaya in Bellevue OR Uwajimaya on 156th. Either/or but not both! Just too many offhand refences to places, landmarks (like the now-imploded Kingdome) and local "things" to prove he had actually done his homework or something. I know some people were very impressed by that level of detail, but I found it, once again, artificial. Coupland writes Microserfs like a journal and brings up many interesting points, like how Gen X parents expected their company to take care of them forever and in exchange the employees gave unwavering loyalty. Gen Xers think of almost all jobs as temporary stepping stones to something else. Interestingly, most of what technical talk Coupland included is all pretty out of date considering that the software industry moves like lightning. Most of the interesting observations come in the beginning of the book when the main character is still working for Microsoft. Most of Coupland's references are so dead-on with regard to Microsoft culture and life, which is probably why most Microsofties read it and like it. However, when all the employees move to the Bay Area to work at a start-up, the book completely loses direction and all sense of coherence. The narrator, Dan, discusses his co-workers and their quirks, discusses how he does not understand what exactly the "Information Superhighway" is supposed to be and goes off on a tangent about how major freeway construction died around 1975. He notes that only foreign employees at Microsoft seem to smoke, and it is not a surprise that user-friendliness is a West Coast American concept. Later in the book, the observations deteriorate to Dan reporting what his friends have said, such as the reasons why breakfast cereals are "decadent" or Karla and other characters discussing how their Barbie dolls had sex lives. Yes the book explores the ever-searching nature of people born in this generation, yes the book examines the culture of Microsoft and can be painstakingly funny in doing so, and yes the book is readable. Is it great? Is it a classic? No. It can be read in a half day for fun, and that should be all you read it for.
Rating:
Summary: Fun read
Review: This was about the only book I have actually read. I found it pretty interesting and fun. Being a novice programmer it was interesting to see the lives of the pros and how badly they live to follow their art. The part about microsoft was funny.
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