Microsoft Secrets - Hardcover

Drawing on two year of on-site observation with unprecedented access to confidential documents and project data, this book reveals how the world’s most powerful software company creates technology, shapes markets and manages people.

Beyond the unquestioned genius and vision of CEO Bill Gates, what accounts for Microsoft's astounding success?

Microsoft commands the high ground of the information superhighway by owning the operating systems and basic applications programs that run on the world's 170 million computers. Drawing on two years of unrestricted access to confidential documents and project data, eminent technology-scientists Cusumano and Selby reveal, for the first time, many of Microsoft's innermost secrets.

Forty in-depth interviews with employees enabled the authors to identify seven key strategies
which demonstrate exactly how Microsoft competes and operates. They reveal a style of leadership, organisation, competition and product development which is both consistent with the company's loosely structured 'progammer' culture and remarkably effective for mass-market production of software.

Managers in many different industries will discover hundreds of invaluable lessons in this superbly readable book.

'If you want to know the answers – how did Microsoft get to its dominant position, what is it doing to maintain that dominant position, and what are its plans for expanding its dominance – this is the book to read'.
LESTER C. THUROW, Sloan School of Management, MIT