Microsoft 2.0: How Microsoft Plans to Stay Relevant in the
Post-gates
Era
, by Mary Jo Foley
If you need a Christmas gift for an
insomniac geek, look no further. This book is the product of
an extremely well-informed and thorough blogger, Mary Jo
Foley, who has been following the fortunes of Microsoft and
its key players for many years. She clearly knows a great deal
of what goes on behind the scenes in Redmond and presents a
plethora of facts about roles within the organisation and
details of products. There are dozens of named individuals in
Microsoft 2.0 but the book gives no real insight into the
personalities and motivation of those who will run Microsoft
now that Bill Gates has retired to spend more time with his
billions.
Sure there are occasional references to Bill's people, or
Ballmer's people, but nothing about what makes them tick, leaving
the reader without any feel for the dynamics or tensions at play in
one of the world's largest technology companies. Even the smallest
companies routinely have power struggles and internal politics that
affect performance, so surely Microsoft must be susceptible to
these too and on a proportionate, if not massive, scale given the
stakes involved. Mary Jo's book does not paint such a picture,
preferring to stick to the facts and carefully considered
speculation about product lines I can only conclude that she did
not want to upset anybody and risk her vital relationships with
company sources.
The style of the book is a little disconcerting, the narrative
trundles along but the incessant footnotes simply refer the reader
to online documents, giving readers a strong hint to put the book
down and go online instead. Likewise the over-size call-outs
(quotes in boxes) on almost every page are only useful if you do
not actually want to read the book properly. The call-outs are
possibly a fast-track (Executive Summary?) through Microsoft 2.0
but there is no value in promoting such profound insights as,
"There is a seemingly related project under development at
Microsoft that has been hush-hush."
Wow! That particular call-out might have been more useful if it
had tied into the associated text reference (the Singularity
project).
Although the purpose of Ms Foley's book is set squarely on the
immediate post-Gates era, the concluding chapter attempts a further
step by considering Microsoft 3.0 this is something of a misnomer
because most of the issues covered in the chapter appear to be
already in play within the so-called Microsoft 2.0 version. If I
had been writing such a book, I would have concluded with looking
forward to Microsoft 3.11 - the era of a reasonably
well-functioning, successful and popular company.
Clearly Microsoft 2.0 will be useful for those readers who need
an insight into the technology strategy of undeniably the world's
most important software company but such readers will also need to
be fairly well-grounded already, in software engineering principles
and the Microsoft product line, to derive value from this book.
What did I learn about Microsoft 2.0? Too little about too much,
is my take-away from reading this book. Microsoft 2.0 is pretty
much an extended snapshot of a blog in a dust-jacket and is, by
virtue of its nature, less effective than the underlying blog, to
which the reader is continually referred. Why not just dip into the
blog instead?
Colin Beveridge is an independent management
troubleshooter and author of blog,
Fighting the Trillion
Dollar Bonfire.