Customer Reviews

Driving Digital: Microsoft and Its Customers Speak about Thriving in the E-Business Era

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Excellent book for those in industry, as well as anyone who wants to better understand how profoundly technology can impact business success.

I didn't expect to like this book. Having worked for a number of the companies highlighted in the Federal Government suit against Microsoft, I thought it might be more rhetoric from Redmond.

However, it's not just Microsoft's views because the "speakers" in the book are real customers; giant companies like Texaco, as you would expect, but also small companies (including one VERY small -- a one-person firm) and even a city mayor and a state governor.

This is a practical guide about using technology to stay competitive, whether your business is large or small. Look for yourself.

From the eyes/connections of a senior veteran Microsoftie you can learn for yourself how business is done and has been changed by technology. A great communicator, Mr. McDowell clears the eyes of the foggy headed, old thinking business manager to the wonders and money savings of tech. A must read for any modernizing or future thinking executive looking for success. This is one of those books that are a cheap investment in the future profitability of your company. Your employees should read it too!

I have a clear understanding in my mind of all the things my company can do to help businesses evolve strategy with our IT products and why that is important, but I have had what I believe to be a somewhat difficult time articulating the "whys and wherefores." This book provides lucid, clearly compelling explanations and examples that crystallize the message of the power of information technolgy.

McDowell and Simon make strong cases for how information technology should not be used simply to do things better than you have done them before, but instead to use it to do things you have never been able to do before. If you don't fully understand technology and want some non-technical explanations of why you should be using it, this book was written for you.

After starting out by saying that the products every business makes will be obsolete in three years because Bill Gates says his will be, the book continues as such a large Microsoft PR release that one wonders if its publisher has become a vanity press. Written on company time, with each word approved by the Flacks of Redmond, it offer little insight. And when the book flap boasts the author speaks with "candor of a Microsoft VP" one can bet he didn't testify at the antitrust trial -- or maybe he did. Buy PRIDE BEFORE THE FALL or WORLD WAR 3.0 if you want to find out how Microsoft does business, not this waste of felled trees.