The Microsoft Way : The Real Story of How the Company Outsmarts It's Competition Book

Randall E. Stross was the first business historian Microsoft let into its archives, enjoying unrestricted access to its Redmond campus for three years. The Microsoft Way thus provides the most incisive analysis of Microsoft and its place in American industry. Stross finds microsoft's success not in predatory marketing but in its eagerness for intelligent employees, bright ideas, and market feedback. Those strengths have helped the firm to grow and to transform itself again and again. In 1990 Microsoft made business software and a clunky PC operating system; in just a few years it has reshaped itself into a leading publisher of CD-ROMs for the home and a contender on the Internet, leaving rivals in the digital dust and rendering any previous company history out of date. Stross follows the shaky birth of Encarta, now the world's bestselling encyclopedia but at one point terminated by Microsoft's board. He traces the company's ever-changing plans for an online world. And he brings the long-term perspective of a historian to the question of whether Microsoft threatens free trade as turn-of-the-century monopolies once did, criticizing the Justice Department's long antitrust suit. The Microsoft Way describes what it's like to work at Microsoft, what lessons rivals can learn from its operation, and how smaller companies can still get a jump on the industry leader, just as Intuit and Netscape did. It also sends a message to every computer user: we'll be better off learning from what Microsoft does well than clinging to a distorted picture of an evil empire.