Review By: Laura Nilsson Bireley
08/26/2002As the author makes clear from the outset, the chief goal of Computing Calamities is to entertain. Secondary goals include illustrating the lessons learned from this anthology of business disasters, and documenting stories of our unique era--the “Computing Rush” of the 21st century--for future generations.

There are two main divisions in Computing Calamities. Chapters 1 and 2 deal with the positives of business culture accepting and even embracing failure--the learning opportunities and fostering of risk-taking to name a couple. Perhaps most intriguing in this section is Glass’ examination of the flaws behind the industry practice of quoting huge project failure rates and the possible reasons for often contradictory numbers from the same sources.

Chapters 3 through 5 could have been titled “Egos Run Amok and Managers Out of Touch.” These three chapters consist of failed companies, projects, and institutions respectively. These are stories of successful and competent people who managed themselves or were managed to the brink of oblivion in a variety of ways.

Each chapter is divided into subchapters that illustrate a subpoint of the chapter theme. Glass begins each section with a preview of the material to focus the reader on the lesson to be learned.

The last chapter returns to the points of the first half of the book and reminds the reader where you started (in case you got lost).

Glass is an engaging writer and manages to hold the reader’s attention with his own anecdotes sprinkled throughout the text. As this is an anthology of articles from a number of sources spanning the timeframe from the early 1980s to the late 1990s, the writing styles vary considerably. Most of the articles are short, making it a great book to read in small pieces on public transit and to put down again without breaking the continuity.

Most of the analysis of what went wrong takes place in the articles themselves, so if you are looking for a roadmap of software project dos and don’ts, this is not it. The people who might find this of greatest value are entrepreneurs and managers. A chief point that comes through in the stories is that failure is always a management problem. Many of these disasters could have been averted through a little humility and communication on the part of the owners and managers in these stories.

Glass ends up putting another plug in for the virtues of embracing failure as the mother of creativity and employee honesty. But then, he really just wants to entertain you. If for no other reason, read it to find out what happened to the Amiga computer and why Atari fizzled.