The Microsoft Edge: Inside Strategies for Building Success (edition 1999)

Amazon.com Amazon.com Review (ISBN 0671034138, Hardcover)

The Microsoft Edge, by former Microsoft manager Julie Bick, outlines approximately five dozen business tactics that are successfully used within the company. Based upon her own experiences and those of 40 other managers, it presents them in short lessons that focus on hiring and retaining top employees, introducing new products and maintaining their momentum, conducting business online, and developing positive relationships with both internal and external partners. Some lessons (such as "On the Web you can alter your product or promotion daily by measuring responses and tweaking as you go") may seem obvious, but Bick's supplementary details (explaining, for example, exactly how the CarPoint site's option-pricing feature was reconfigured when logs showed few visitors were using it) are truly instructive. And while the book definitely shows Microsoft in the best possible light, some of its most illuminating material concerns the handling of notable problems--such as the total failure of the highly publicized Bob software, and the inability to debug a consumer tax-preparation program in time for its intended launch. --Howard Rothman