Rating: 
Summary: Pass it up. There are less partial books available
Review: Stross was given access to Microsoft employees and resources while working on this book. He repays the favor by being the official Microsoft apologist. If Stross had some technical knowledge (rather than being a historian) he might have been capable of reaching some independent judgments. As it is, he merely parrots the Microsoft line at every point. He even repeats the ludicrous claim that Microsoft is not a monopoly. The two products Stross follows at length, Encarta and Money are not very important. If he had at least researched NT, there might have been one good reason to read this very one-sided book. Purchasers have the right to expect better from authors.
Rating: 
Summary: Instructive book
Review: Stross' book goes beyond explaining the ways of Microsoft to man, but explains what it takes to stay up-to-date. As is oft said, the leader of one revolution can not be the leader of another. Because Stross have had a total archival access that's why the reasons why Microsoft company is in the high stakes high technology business are very clear.
Tongue and cheek aside, this book is a real way of thinking in a company. Bill Gates is not the ruthless taskmaster that some people try to denonciate.
Rating:
Summary: 1 Sided
Review: This book had some good information about the history ofM.S. but was very 1 sided. If you want to read 256 pages about whyM.S. and all of it's people are far better then the rest of the world and everyone else is stupid including the government for looking at the way M.S. does business then this is the book for you.
Rating: 
Summary: Consider the data source with _Microsoft_Way_
Review: This was a very well-researched & documented book. Well-written, but sometimes difficult to follow the author's writing style. If one is looking for a technical overview/history of Microsoft, this is not the book for you. The book does offer an interesting look at other aspects of the company (its hiring practices, for example). I thought many of the recent Microsoft issues considered so important to the public (antitrust suits, extremely bug-ridden code, initial denial in early 90's of the Internet) glossed over or not covered at all.
Rating:
Summary: Consider the data source with _Microsoft_Way_
Review: This was a very well-researched & documented book. Well-written, but sometimes difficult to follow the author's writing style. If one is looking for a technical overview/history of Microsoft, this is not the book for you. The book does offer an interesting look at other aspects of the company (its hiring practices, for example). I thought many of the recent Microsoft issues considered so important to the public (antitrust suits, extremely bug-ridden code, initial denial in early 90's of the Internet) glossed over or not covered at all.
Rating:
Summary: very biased view of Microsoft
Review: While there are some interesting insights to some of Microsoft's history, this book skips over vast territories of non-competitive behavior. There's nothing on how the Microsoft overcame their competitors in the application spaces (word processing, spread-sheet, presentations, etc). Instead the book spends most of it's time on how Microsoft cultivated the CDROM as a new medium. The author had access to Microsoft employees and lost his objectivity due to this. The first few chapters could have been written by Microsoft's PR department. The author's idea of Microsoft uniqueness: Microsoft tries to hire smart people. I'm sure there will be a Harvard MBA case study on companies which went out of their way to hire the mentally deficient and how that wasn't an effective strategy against Microsoft.
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