"Microsoft 2.0" by Mary Jo Foley

Whilst I was at TechEd last week someone gave me a free copy of "Microsoft 2.0" by Mary Jo Foley". It is supposed to tell me "How Microsoft Plans to Stay Relevant in the Post-Gates Era". I'm not sure it does.  I summarised it as follows:

• Bill Gates is leaving Microsoft and other people will be doing his job
• The Future for Microsoft is complicated, and almost certainly not the same as The Present

There is a lot of background on the people at Microsoft, which stops just shy of being libelous in some cases. There is some detail on products and where they might be going in the future which you can pick up more easily (and in an up to date form) on the web. There is a a fair bit of repetition. And more than a few errors. The Xbox 360 has never suffered from the "Three Rings of Death" - that just sounds like a very dangerous circus. And Microsoft didn't actually manage to buy Yahoo that I recall...

Each page has big callouts on it, presumably designed for high flying types who don't want to read all the text (and it also reduce the number of words required to fill the 283 pages). My favourite is on page 191 "Microsoft must avoid several obstacles as it moves from the old way of doing business to the new." Yeah. Right.

I did not like this book much, and I got it for free. If I'd paid 29 dollars for it I would be rather cross. Perhaps the detail was lost on me, or perhaps I already know a fair bit of what was being said. Either way, take a look at the text before you part with any cash.