Microsoft secrets - Michael A Cusumano

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 programs that run on the world's 170 million computers.Drawing on two years of unrestricted access to confidential documents and 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, organization, competition and product development which is both consistent with the company's loosely structured 'programmer' culture and remarkably effective for mass-market production of software.Managers and executives in many different industries will discover hundreds of invaluable lessons in this superbly readable book.

Michael Cusumano teaches strategy and technology managment at MIT's Sloan School of Management. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.Richard Selby teaches information and computer science at the University of California, Irvine. He lives in Irvine, California.

'A fascinating book about a fascinating company'
Peter Senge, author of The Fifth Discipline