Books

Few companies ever achieve the level of success Microsoft enjoys. So it hardly comes as a surprise that authors Michael A. Cusumano and Richard W. Selby have chosen to examine-thoroughly-the inner workings of the business that Bill Gates built.

Microsoft Secrets: How the World's Most Powerful Software Company Creates Technology, Shapes Markets, and Manages People (The Free Press, $30 cloth) is the fruit of Cusumano and Selby's labor. Granted open access to Microsoft for a period of several months, the authors clearly relished the opportunity to go where few have gone before.

"Although we are not the first authors to study Bill Gates and Microsoft . . . most of the many articles, academic case studies and popular books have focused on the history of the company and the personality of the founder," Cusumano and Selby write. "What remains largely a mystery are Microsoft's crown jewels: the key concepts that it has used to create technology, shape the markets in which it competes and manage the creative energies of thousands of highly skilled technical people."

Even if yours is not a software company, you're still apt to gain more than a byteful of knowledge from the detailed analysis the authors put forth. At the end, however, one question may remain: Why would Microsoft-the undisputed king of the software hill-consent to such scrutiny?

That's a secret we'll let you solve yourself.

This article was originally published in the January 1996 print edition of Entrepreneur with the headline: Books.