Microsoft Secrets

Authors: Michael A. Cusumano Richard W. Selby

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, New York.

The book "Microsoft Secrets" is about software development, this is one of the few good software engineering books, and it's not about the Microsoft story or Microsoft personalities, except when these things affect the development model. The book "Microsoft Secrets" is very useful to people interested in the design and implementation of large software. The authors Cusumano & Selby described the Microsoft's development process and it's internal facts in a very organized way.

Associate Professor Richard W. Selby, University of California, Irvine, USA and the another author is Michael A. Cusumano of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology devoted two years to uncovering what most of the world doesn't know about Microsoft and reveal many of Microsoft's innermost secrets. The book "Microsoft Secrets" is written in the year of 1995, this book is published by Simon & Schuster, New York.

I selected this because I have a great interest to learn various processes or strategies that the successful companies follow. I had also read the book "The Road Ahead" by Bill Gates in which, I knew very internal thoughts of Bill Gates and his thinking of to Attack the future, and I think he is as good as in business as he is in technical skills.

I read "Microsoft Secrets" with full of interest because after reading some books about Microsoft. I wanted to learn about Microsoft's software development policies and strategies and their predictions about the future technology. And after reading this book I found every answer of my question and it is sure if the authors of this book give another book about Microsoft then I will certainly read that also. After reading this book I come to this conclusion that in any organization or company's success their employees play very important role. The reason of the Microsoft's success is that it has a very great, talented, and business minded executives.

"Microsoft Secrets" is distinguishes in its documentary style. In this book the authors described each and every thing with a very different way they give various parts of conversations with Microsoft's executives and their personal views. I think this book is very good for software developers and company executives. Right now, I am doing a part time job in a web- based company; we develop web-applications. After reading this book I discuss some points of this in the official meeting of my company, every body appreciated some of Microsoft's strategies. I recommended every one to read this book to understand the basics of a very successful and such a big company.

The book "Microsoft Secrets" gives deep analysis of Microsoft's software-development strategies and management style, and resists the temptation to indulge the reader in company gossip. In this book the authors Cusumano & Selby described all Microsoft's strategies and principles they described these in seven major strategies and 25 principals. The book contains approximately five hundred pages of solid information and amazing detail about the internal structures and processes that have allowed the company to dominate the software industry, yet Microsoft has real secrets it didn't share with the authors or may not allow them to write, because they agreed to let Microsoft review a draft of the book to ensure that the book didn't publicly disclose Microsoft's product strategies, such as when a program is scheduled to ship.

Now these days 83 percent of the computer users in the world use the Products of Microsoft. In this book, Cusumano & Selby describe in detailed, how Microsoft organizes, competes, develops new products, and learn from it's products and always keep in mind to give users new features and reliable products. Microsoft's revenues from starting to present date are really impressive. There were three employees when they started their company but now at present more then 27000 employees are working in the Microsoft. This is very big organization. In this book Cusumano & Selby describes in detail the various strategies and principles of the Microsoft, how Microsoft works, how they build a new system, their testing techniques and how Bill Gates utilize his experts and talented employees.

After reading this book really I am feeling very good because I learnt about a big and successful organization very broadly and really this was interesting. I will try to read more books on Microsoft. I think in some processes Microsoft follows some XP process as they believe to work on small groups, they don't believe to design a document (Also Bill Gates don't like), they break the big projects in small modules and after prioritizing them they set three to four milestones, so I found in Microsoft something similarity of XP process. Or I can say they are success to build their projects because they follow the similar practices as extreme programming developers do. Because Microsoft usually give its incremental version after 18 to 24 months, so developers add some advance feature in the desktop application, so approximate they just use only 50% code from the previous versions this practice save their time and money. The code reusability is a good practice.

I believe that "Microsoft Secrets" is an important book for software developers to read. In this there is not the usual gossipy stuff about how Bill spent his early childhood or why the Justice Department has been investigating them (I have read various books about Bill Gates regarding this). But in the "Microsoft Secrets", there is a fair amount of discussion about the company's business strategy and marketing strategy. But if somebody's only interest in life is writing beautiful C++ code, then you may find some of it boring. But one who is an aspiring entrepreneur who hopes to build a company that's even a fraction as successful as Microsoft has been; it's important to read the analysis that Cusumano and Selby provide of the company's organization, competition, leadership style, and product development strategies. The two authors clearly had access to many of the middle-level managers within the company, and they've documented and cited the details from their interviews very carefully.

Here is I am giving about the Microsoft's different strategies and principles in short paragraphs.

First, find smart people who know the technology and the business, Microsoft's believes to hire smart people who know the technology and business, they understand software technology, and they know how to convert this technology in to moneymaking business. The firm, from the beginning, has continuously sought, and employed, such people and can thus immediately grasp opportunities when they appear.

Second, organize small teams of overlapping functional specialists; Microsoft has large teams of small teams. Microsoft believes to work in small groups and in each group manage by a project manager, who give his expert advise to whole team. Microsoft people work together in small multi functional teams and officially and formally share various tasks developed by them. This is a blend of two leading concepts in new products management today have small work groups and have highly skilled functional specialists. At all times functional skills are at work, and "team members" do not lose sight of their major contribution. Yet, by having an overall plan, and overall team management, the small clusters or various features are involved across all functions. So the firm achieves both functional skills and multifunctional operations. They talk about having distinct functional skills that are overlapped at the boundaries. This gives independence but not lawlessness.

Third, pioneer and orchestrate evolving mass markets, Microsoft always observes the market's requirements and also keeps in mind how to compete as a company by creating product selections and setting industry standards. Microsoft also believes in creativity, it deals with defining new products and development processes. This means to be the first, or early, to enter a market, find and build mass markets, don't wait for perfect products but build a steam of incrementally better ones flowing in the direction of the market, and try to lead those markets in directions favorable to the firm.

Fourth, focus creativity by evolving features and fixing resources. Program managers look to the customer's request to identify and prioritize product features and various functions. This means giving teams vision statements for general guidance, freedom to implement those as their skills direct, insisting that developers keep in mind the volume of demand for the features they are building, and then restricting the total effort by tight restrictions on dollars and time available. This gains creativity, but focuses it where the dollars are, and forces sign-offs. After looking at the vision statement and specification documents each developer team gives there expected scheduled time. By this strategy Microsoft increases the efficiency of the software development.

Fifth, do everything in parallel, with frequent synchronizations, this strategy tells us that we should do parallel development and then their should frequent synchronization. Microsoft people believe that large projects are simpler to manage if we have clearly defined functionality of the system. They want creative thinking to continue as deep into the project as possible, yet they want the order that comes from integrating all of the work. Microsoft achieves all this by having the small groups work at feverish pace almost all the way through the project, but having a running synchronization at regular intervals where the output of each small group is hooked onto the total product being developed. This is the activity where one small group's most recent set of code is put onto the "build" and the build then run as a semi completed product.

The synchronization must work, and people are brought in "off the street" to run the programs as a check. This makes for continuous creation of parts, and continuous testing of the product. The Microsoft developers design the application in their own way and then they synchronize their design and solve the conflicts, because other developer may have developed component on other design basis, so they frequently keep conversation and do their development with any restrictions of coding style or rather than they have to follow the old logic given by project manager.

Microsoft sixth strategy believes to work as a building a learning organization. Sixth, improve through continuous self-critiquing, feedback, and sharing. Microsoft is its early years were not known for self-critique. The authors Cusumano & Selby feel the firm today has so clearly accepted a new position on this point that critique has become one of their key strategies. Information sharing is now important - both as between the marketplace and the firm, and as between various functions within the firm.

Seventh, attack the future. Microsoft has an ability to create a seemingly endless array of new products and take advantage of an enormous base of existing products and customers. Here attack the future means no complacency, do whatever is necessary to shape future opportunities in the market, and capitalize on them for Microsoft.

Microsoft's developers fix a deadline for a particular task. The authors of this book Sir Cusumano & Selby defines the strategy in which software development happen with a deadline called "synch and stabilize." In practice, synch and stabilize starts with a series of small teams that are organized around a software title Microsoft is developing. Microsoft also prepares a detailed report called a specification document that defines how the user interface will look and how it will behave.

When development begins, the software code each team develops is periodically synchronized. It also is reviewed each day with the product goals in mind. In Microsoft the developers can set their own hours and to pursue their ideas, as long as the project can be completed within the programmer's own deadline. I think this policy is very effective in part because there's a tremendous amount of peer pressure within Microsoft. If a project slips, it is the offender's fellow employees who will want to know why. But synch and stabilize is much more comprehensive than just a daily routine of software-code reviews.

By the help of "Synch and stabilize" strategy they show how this vital capability enables Microsoft not only to build an increasing variety of complex features and end products for fast-paced markets with short life cycles, but also to shape evolving mass markets and foster organizational learning. They examine how the flexibility of this process allows the company to "scale up" for larger and more complex projects; a key asset that Microsoft must continue to cultivate in order to maintain its position as industry leader.

In the book "Microsoft Secrets" the authors (researchers) Cusumano & Selby give their views about Microsoft's strategy and their marketing techniques. Microsoft always believes to hire skillful management and employees and really after reading this chapter I understood the value of skillful, technical and creative employees.

If someone above of you (boss) wanted creative work from you then you will always try to give your best this is most important fact, which I understood after reading this book. The authors' Sir Cusumano & Selby presented these principles in a very effective way. Even these principles are not unique for any organization but Bill Gates applied all the necessary principles and rules to reach at the top of the software industry.

I believe the success of Microsoft begun because of its founders and their talents; otherwise it was very tough at that time to manage a software company. Microsoft always plays very uncompromising and tough process when they hiring new employees and managers. That's why every person of Microsoft knows technology and always trying to implement this technology to the market products.

Microsoft believes to hire a CEO with a deep understanding of both the technology and business, here I am totally agreed with this technique. Because if a person who understands the technology or who know what will be the next requirement of the market can be a successful person in business, Microsoft people always look to the market and always keep in mind what is the user require, so Microsoft people understand the latest technology and always try to implement new concept and always try to fulfill the user requirements. Microsoft management team and all other employees know how to fix their product in the market at the top place and also they know how to compete their competitors. Bill Gates is the most successful manager in the business world.

Bill Gate's "Brain Trust" of talented employees and exceptional management, "bang for the buck" competitive strategies, and clear organizational goals produce an orientation toward self-critiquing, learning, and improving; a flexible, incremental approach to product development; and a relentless pursuit of future markets.

Bill Gate's approach, is his philosophy, and his strategic vision permeates, and because of his guidance and policies the software company Microsoft reach at the top in the world. He is very talented in both fields' technical understanding of the software and how to create moneymaking business from it. Really early years of Microsoft Bill Gates did the selection of new products and features. Now he has some senior executives and technical experts, they help Bill Gates to set Microsoft future policies.

In the Microsoft succeed is good, but to fail is unacceptable. Bill Gates doesn't like to hear any unpleasant news from the developers and also he dislikes hiding the weaknesses. This type of policy means, as a risk or reward scenario, the risk of failure vastly exceeds the reward of success. Thus, most companies suffer from a workforce that pursues a course of failure avoidance. In contrast, at Microsoft, failure is expected, and even required because risking failure is the only way to push the envelope. As a result, Microsoft people relentlessly pursue success without fear of failure. And if they fail, they understand that the key is to fail quickly and not waste time.

Performance is all that matters at Microsoft, so much so that excuses are flat-out irrelevant. In fact, Microsoft is so stubbornly focused on performance or we can say that Microsoft is a "heartless" and "unfair." Software Company. But the end result of this single-minded concern for success is that Microsoft performs like a champion sports team.

Bill Gates and Microsoft's other senior executives really understand what's happening in their organization. Every month, the lead manager on every project e-mails a status report to Bill and the other key managers, providing an update on the project's status and any major problems. In addition, every Saturday morning, Bill Gates calls every single vice president and spends half an hour discussing the issues in each department. Bill Gates has such a deep understanding of programming and technology, he's able to communicate down through the ranks and even grill the software developers who actually perform the work. Because Bill understands what is happening throughout the company, Bill Gates decisions are generally the correct ones for the strategic direction of the company.

I read Bill Gates's very popular book "the road ahead", after reading that book I understood about the Bill Gates strategies and his predictions about the future. After that I was more interested to read the Microsoft's strategies how they work and what they think about the future, how they tackle so big software and what they predict about the future. All answers of these questions I got in this book "Microsoft Secrets" and really this was very worthy reading for me. From the book "the road ahead" I read Bill Gates wrote his first computer program when he was of 13 years old. It was very surprising for me that how much aware Bill Gates was at those early days of computers. And he proved his awareness about computer software of reaching at the top position of the software industry.

Microsoft manages product development in very scheduled way, but I think before Mike Maples there were lots of uncertainties about the development process. Bill Gates believes to work on small teams and he also strongly believes development on one site. I think this is the right way because if the developers personally know each other and also they know who is implementing what, then they could easily contact with each other or can have various informal meetings in a lunch time or after office, sometimes these little discussions help very much in the development process. Although the Microsoft people do mails (official) to each other and keep track of their requirements but the policy of personally interact with each other is really nice.

But now these days there are so many examples in which the developers give their contributions from various parts of the world, as recently I learnt about Concurrent Version Control people use to store their source code and it also keep track of all versions and other required information. Microsoft is a big organization and it has centers in the various parts of the world so they should not think about development on one site because Microsoft can set it's own setup can use it's various centers of the world as a development center rather than only using that centers as a marketing offices. By applying this the developers and project mangers can give their best according various centers requirements.

In the "Microsoft Secrets" the authors tell about testing, according to authors Microsoft has equal number of developers and tester they have approximate 1800 developers and testers (from the book) but I am not feeling that in any software company there is a need of so much testers that every developer has one tester this ratio is too high. I think 20-30% testers from the total number of developer are enough for any software developer company. And even there are so many testers but Microsoft gives buggy products, so I think there is no need of so many testers in any software company. According to Prof. Ralph Johnson the testers usually know, where the developer do the mistakes in the code and they pick the bug faster then any developer.

There are some most senior executives like Rick Rashid (Prof. Computer Science, CMU) and Mike Maples (Elect. Engg. , M.B.A.) Etc. they are very success to maintaining a very creative and healthy environment and after applying their suggestions Microsoft achieved various milestones in the software industry. That happened only because of Microsoft's strategy of hire smart people and Bill Gates knows how to utilize one's knowledge. Microsoft's culture is one of maximizing long-term profits by and Microsoft executives do by hiring smart and talented employees, in the near term, capturing market share in strategic markets.

At Microsoft, the most important qualification for a manager is expertise in the functional area over which he is managing. According to Cusumano & Selby Managers at Microsoft fully understand the work the people who report to them do. Almost without exception, those managers could do the job of any individual doing the core work for their team, because they are skilled persons in business and technical fields For example, managers of marketing teams are great marketers; managers of sales teams are excellent sales people; and, managers of programming teams are expert programmers. This principle applies all the way up to Bill Gates, who is an expert at programming, Microsoft's core competency.

After reading the book "Microsoft Secrets" I find that one of the enjoyable things about working at Microsoft is that even the least talented are pretty damn smart, the average are superb, and the best leave you trying every day to match their work, because the atmosphere of the Microsoft makes people to think in smartest way. Microsoft rigorously attempts to hire only the smartest people, but don't confuse smarts with knowledge. Knowledge is for books on a shelf. Microsoft seeks individuals who can turn on their brains and really think. In this company the developer learn all from code and nobody give him any assistance to learn the code even this feature is very new for the developer. These are the types of people who create new ideas, catch errors quickly, and come up with a more efficient way of doing things. In essence, by hiring the smartest people, Microsoft goes a long way toward ensuring a highly productive workforce.

I believe this book is a good medium to understand how the Microsoft people make the big software products, as I explained above Microsoft believes to work in small teams here I think there is similarities between Microsoft's strategy and extreme programming process because in XP we work in pairs, I see many similarities in Microsoft process and XP process (But some are really against each other), but I saw wherever Microsoft shows it's expertise issues their I find some similarity with XP process. As Microsoft people and Bill Gates don't believe in too much documentation, they just rely on source code and they do some documentation just to keep history of the product, for another feature development they always look at the code, the documentation of any product generally explain about the API or other main features of the software. In XP we always look at the code to understand the nature of the code. We don't do any documentation in XP. In the book it's given that there are only 12 pages for the win word project. Even these papers are not very helpful to developers to precede further versions.

Microsoft usually works on a large project but with small teams, so different people in a project work on distinct copies of the source code at the same time, so it is easy to create incompatible changes. So some time it's longer discover problems and reconcile the changes, the greater the expense. Microsoft does a very unique policy that is called "Smoke test"; Microsoft solves the problem by requiring daily builds. In the book authors explained that Microsoft developers not feel good when they daily build executable of their codes, but they also agree with this fact that this is the most helping factor of their software development strategy.

The process, in short, is for a developer to make changes to a private copy, test the changes, incorporate changes other developers made to the master copy since the private copy was made and he has to mention the sign in and sign out expected data before doing these on a common board of that particular project from this other developer prepare themselves according to the expected changes, rebuild a private executable, test it (looking for interactions with recent updates to the master copy), then add the changes to the master copy (again resolving differences made by other developers since the previous merge). A designated developer rebuilds the executable from the master copy every day and runs a series of automated tests against it. This process is a good example of trading off because in this the developer feels that this is tedious task but from daily build process every developer let to know what is the presently condition of their software and which functions have implemented.

According to this book we can say that rules at Microsoft are few and far between, and the ones that exist tend to make sense. Having only a few important, logical rules means that employees actually remember and follow them. Microsoft doesn't give employees any memo or document that describe the rules and proper security badge procedure, including lengthy details how and where to wear the badge. Microsoft has a simple way of maximizing its employees' productivity: It allows each individual's office to be as individualized as one desires. That means making the office more like home. Everything from real offices to windows in most offices, from free soft drinks to no dress code, from an open supply room to anything-goes work hours. Quite simply, these policies improve employee morale, and thus increase overall productivity. Microsoft is an interesting balance between strategy, culture, and process.

In the book "Microsoft Secrets" the authors Cusumano & Selby described in a very efficient way that how Microsoft people select features in a software product, when the Microsoft didn't follow any official process to develop a software then they usually were not able to ship a project on the expected ship date, then the project managers take big decisions that what feature to leave out or should they shift the ship date. There are several examples in Microsoft in which Microsoft shifted its expected ship date of a particular product for 4 weeks to even 4-5 months. The book discusses a process called "activity based planning". In it, users are studied to discover what their major activities are and what steps they take when performing each activity. Proposed features are judged by how well they support key activities.

Before shipping any product Microsoft uses the specific information when deciding whether the product is ready to ship: a checklist of feature completion; trends in number of bugs found, active, fixed, and verified; number of unfixed bugs and their severity; status of testing against plan; changes in bug severity distribution; amount of regression testing done; amount of recent change to the source code. The project manager ships the software after all the testing.

Microsoft works in a very scheduled way I find here various similarities of the Microsoft's development process and software engineering process (As I have discussed above also) that Microsoft believes to work in small teams and also they break a large project in to small sub projects as we do in XP to write the user stories and after breaking the tasks in to various sub-tasks they figure out the most important part of the system and start the development. We do same in XP we prioritize the user stories according to the customer's requirement, and as we set the iteration time in XP the Microsoft developers give their own expected time complete the particular sub-task. The Microsoft strategy behind the small teams is that, small teams work their work more efficiently. Microsoft people take great pride in their work, partly because they have a great deal of freedom in how they go about their jobs. Pranks, jokes, and games are all part of the atmosphere. It's a work hard, play hard culture.

In the Microsoft every programmer choose his own task and free to give their time estimate that how much time he will take to complete that particular sub tasks. The developer's life at Microsoft is very free and there is no any official environment the developers can live in the offices according to their life style, they can eat fast food all day and wash it down with Coke.

I think Microsoft does not work as a single organization or company; rather it is a collection of small, independent companies. The primary job functions at Microsoft are creating, testing, marketing, and selling software. And, amazingly enough, these functions are largely performed separately for each and every software project. Thereby, Microsoft largely avoids the bureaucracy that weighs down so many large companies. Thus, Microsoft retains the independence and agility of a small company, while also benefiting from the financial resources, marketing muscle, and overall strategic direction of a large, powerful corporation.

Microsoft people don't believe to reuse the code, there might be a problem that the developer think that they are smart enough to develop new concept or they don't like the previous coding styles of the previous developers. Whenever I think about various software engineering tools and processes that Microsoft people apply in their software developments then I also think why the Microsoft don't reuse the code very frequently. The solution of this question is may be that the Microsoft hires a smart and talented developer so the developer may think that he is one of the Microsoft's talented people and he believes that he is the only competent programmer in the whole company. Since everyone else is presumed to be not smart enough so why the new developer reuse the code written by other person who has not as much knowledge as the new developer have.

But in this book "Microsoft Secrets" the authors reported that Microsoft believes technology is changing so quickly that most of their software will have to be thrown away or completely rewritten every three years. In that case, the economic incentive for reuse is relatively small. But of course, some degree of reuse does take place within Microsoft, and the company's MFC class library is certainly a good example of a "reuse product" that has achieved some strategic importance.

Microsoft from the starting have given very large number of applications in various versions from early MS-DOS to latest MS-DOS 6.0, The Large projects that produce new versions of desktop applications are divided into multiple phases, each lasting a few months, each producing a product to which we can ship, each adding a wave of new features. Microsoft keeps a very good concept that is its buffer time. Product manager uses the buffer time only because of unwanted break or cause in the development. In the condition of late development the project manager shifts all the features that don't make the milestone into the next milestone of that phase. The frequent milestones force early visibility of problems, as does the emphasis on completing features before moving on. On the other side the testers do their job of testing continuously of the developed feature. The entire project has a stabilization phase at the end. There is no separate product maintenance.

Development is preceded by a planning phase that produces a "vision document" for the release and also outlines of specification documents in which they described about the new features of the software, what they found after the detailed analysis of the various end user's requirements.

Microsoft has the equal numbers of testers and developer and they do parallel testing of the developed feature. In that case, developers give private releases of their code to "testing buddies" so that bugs can be found before they contaminate the master source. Microsoft claims a 1:1 ratio of developers to testers. The book gives brief descriptions of the type of testing done. But I believe in the Microsoft there are large numbers of testers as I discussed these points above in this document.

Microsoft people generally do whatever the customers want and always try to make a software that will be easy to use and have a easily understandable user interface, they also keep track of user's enquiries and customers requirements to help of developing the new software in the feature. But I Microsoft's strategy of not to disclose their coming products details is not appreciable they just want to be on a first position of the software industry.

Microsoft's employees use their own tools and platforms (operating systems) to develop new feature of that particular project, as in the book explained that developers used Windows 95, when they were developing the features of the same product. I think this is a good practice because when you are working on the same product, to whom you are using always aware you that particular function of that program is working and one can do various compatible tests.

Microsoft hires fresher as a tester, they hire graduates and engineers from many U.S. Universities, as I described above that in the Microsoft there are equal number of developers and testers, but in Microsoft who works as a tester usually not do coding (even some exceptions are there.). I believe that Microsoft should change its policy to hire new comers as a testers because in testing, tester can't apply any innovative idea and he just checks the various code and logic written by others, and Microsoft is not utilize it's ability to develop something, so I think their should be some swapping between developers and testers.

Microsoft people believes in one site development, but here I am thinking that Microsoft should change its policy to work on only one site, there are lots of option for such a big company, I learnt about concurrent version control system, really this system is very nice. It keeps all the source code and also keeps track of all the checkouts and check ins. Microsoft also can set a new web based version control system and can utilize the abilities of the developers from the different areas of the world. But in this book researchers Cusumano & Selby didn't specified something about this.

I think that now Bill Gates should give to the world new technology and concentrate more on research and development part of my company, even Microsoft is giving sufficient amount for research and development, but I think all of Microsoft people are not very serious to give something innovative, they always just try to give incremented versions of previous desktop applications.

Though the book was published in 1995, it appears that most of the writing took place in 1994, and many of the interviews of Microsoft people took place in 1993. I mention this only to provide a "time-synch" with regard to current events. Though there are occasional references to "online networks" like Microsoft Network and CompuServe/AOL, there's no mention of the Internet, World Wide Web, Netscape, or Java.

Now, Microsoft is not concentrating very much in the field of operating systems, they are just developing desktop applications and giving incremented versions of windows. As we know the Microsoft's operating system are not such popular in professionals just because of they are buggy. I think Microsoft should give more attention to the operating systems because these days Linux is going to be the popular operating system. And I can say that in future it is going to give a big challenge to Microsoft's operating systems because Linux is an open source operating system and it is getting more features from all over the world. There are so many other fields; they're some work need to be done. As web protocol system, and I am predicting that next generation will be of robotics & automation generation and I suggest that Microsoft should start to work on this field and should set some platform or groundwork in its various desktop applications for the future as the software compatibilities with different type of electrical and electronics devices. Here might be I am mispredicting. I have thought so many fields in which they should start to work on that particular field that may be future of the software industry.

This book is really a good effort by Sir Cusumano & Selby, but didn't described any thing about the net and I believe that after internet revolution Microsoft might changed its strategies for the web technologies and might have introduced new strategies for the web products, so I am looking to the next version of this, in which these such a good writers will explores the Microsoft's new strategies and aware us about the new coming softwares of the Microsoft.