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dunguyen's review
1.0
I don't know exactly what I expected from this book when I started reading, but I was nonetheless disappointed. The subject itself sounds really good, sort of how in a huge corporation like Microsoft, innovations could arise from the grassroots but in the end, there's just too much working against the story.
The book details two hackathon projects (a hackathon is where employees are given free reins to "hack" together a project without having any influence from their regular work) where the projects ended up helping people with disabilities. The first project was to improve the life quality of people with ALS, which was influenced by former NFL player Steve Gleason. The other project was to help people with dyslexia learn better using OneNote. Both are fascinating tales in itself but I felt the writing took so much away from the story that it ceased to be a good story and rather felt like corporate propaganda.
Throughout the very short book, the writing's just sloppy. There's changes in tense between paragraphs, too many characters mentioned who simply don't figure in the story after their mention, change in perspective in a paragraph. The structuring of the two stories was not good either. In the first story, there's a technical section which is much more technical than what it should have been. This section seems like it's potentially skippable, except there's actual related information to the story at the end of the section. There are huge jumps in the timeline, from the hackathon in 2015 to present day 2018. What happened in between?
I really hoped this book would be good and show how in a corporation, innovation comes from anywhere and how important it is that everyone regardless of disability can be empowered. Sadly the writing subtracted too much from the cases. Ultimately it feels like a cheap marketing ploy from Microsoft instead of a story about how engineers in a huge corporation found a way to improve people's lives directly through their innovations.
The book details two hackathon projects (a hackathon is where employees are given free reins to "hack" together a project without having any influence from their regular work) where the projects ended up helping people with disabilities. The first project was to improve the life quality of people with ALS, which was influenced by former NFL player Steve Gleason. The other project was to help people with dyslexia learn better using OneNote. Both are fascinating tales in itself but I felt the writing took so much away from the story that it ceased to be a good story and rather felt like corporate propaganda.
Throughout the very short book, the writing's just sloppy. There's changes in tense between paragraphs, too many characters mentioned who simply don't figure in the story after their mention, change in perspective in a paragraph. The structuring of the two stories was not good either. In the first story, there's a technical section which is much more technical than what it should have been. This section seems like it's potentially skippable, except there's actual related information to the story at the end of the section. There are huge jumps in the timeline, from the hackathon in 2015 to present day 2018. What happened in between?
I really hoped this book would be good and show how in a corporation, innovation comes from anywhere and how important it is that everyone regardless of disability can be empowered. Sadly the writing subtracted too much from the cases. Ultimately it feels like a cheap marketing ploy from Microsoft instead of a story about how engineers in a huge corporation found a way to improve people's lives directly through their innovations.
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