Book details of 'The Microsoft Way: The Real Story of How the Company Outsmarts Its Competition'

Title	The Microsoft Way: The Real Story of How the Company Outsmarts Its Competition
Author(s)	Randall E. Stross, J. Bell
ISBN	0201409496
Language	English
Published	November 1996
Publisher	Perseus Publishing

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The Virtual Bookcase Reviews of 'The Microsoft Way: The Real Story of How the Company Outsmarts Its Competition':

Reviewer amazon.com wrote:
Stross, an academic business historian, was given unlimited access to interview Microsoft employees and managers and to rifle through most of Microsoft's corporate records. His main conclusion? That Microsoft's phenomenal success is due in large part to its consistent insistence on hiring the smartest people, and that much Microsoft bashing is reflective of an anti-intellectual strain in American culture. Whether you idolize or despise Microsoft, this book is well worth reading--especially if you are in any way responsible for hiring the best and the brightest for your company.
Reviewer Rob Slade wrote:
High tech competitors resent Microsoft's clout. Geeks resent Microsoft's dominance of the field with bug-laden software. The masses probably wouldn't mind seeing the richest man in the world take a pratfall once in a while. So a book about the things Microsoft does right, backed up by access to the entire company and its internal archives, would be quite a treat. If, that is, the book was any good. Perhaps the implications of that last statement are a bit harsh. While the opening chapters of the book are pretty awful, the material does get better towards the end, when dealing strictly with business practices and money. Overall, the work is merely disappointing. Stross makes a great many pro-Microsoft statements, but fails to provide real backup. The reader is expected to assume that Bill Gates is an intellectual giant, but the only supporting evidence (aside, I suppose, from the converse of "if you're so smart why ain't you rich") is a statement by Bill Gates that Bill Gates has a pretty good memory. The text is not an unadulterated paean of praise: Stross does point out that Microsoft does fail to back up its statements of the general benefit (in terms of the "public good") of its work. However, the promised insider information is not used well in support of Stross' arguments: very little is in evidence in the early chapters, and later material, while interesting, is not vital. The chapter on antitrust investigations is, perhaps, the strongest part of the book, but even there the bottom line is that the deal with Intuit was not allowed to proceed and ultimately MSN was unbundled. Many parts of the book demonstrate a weak grasp of the nuances of technology and the high tech industry. A discussion of analog versus digital forms of information storage insists that analog "data compression" has limits whereas digital compression doesn't. A subsequent look at machine readability isn't very enlightening. While the intent of the volume is not to provide a technical reference, the author's lack of understanding of high technology flaws his analysis of the high technology industry. At times Stross contradicts himself. Page 79 seems to imply that Microsoft did not license rights to an existing encyclopedia for the text of Encarta: pages 82 and 83 show that it did. At other times material is used repetitively in different parts of the book (which is odd in view of the reams of content that must have been available. For technophiles who are fascinated by the gang from Redmond, there is some interesting inside info, although little insight. Those businesspeople interested in emulating the MS success formula will be disappointed. copyright Robert M. Slade, 1996
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