Microsoft secrets : how the world's most powerful software company creates technology, shapes markets, and manages people / Michael A. Cusumano, Richard W. Selby.

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, 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 in many different industries will discove hundreds of invaluable lessons in this superbly readable book

Includes bibliographical references (p. 477-491) and index.