What exactly do you recommend about it? I spent the evening reading it and can only conclude that they were really lucky and nothing more. They had a product

What exactly do you recommend about it? I spent the evening reading it and can only conclude that they were really lucky and nothing more. They had a product that wasn't half bad (though the author likes to point out time and time again about the bugs, issues and outright problems) combined with the fall of all of their competitors makes for a lot of being in the right place at the right time. They have near zero ability to create new products other then by luck. They waste money left and right. They live through their major competitor loosing because they fail to transition to a new platform and only shortly after do the exact same thing learning nothing. The guy goes on and on about how to best run a company only to discover that no one listened to him and that was not how the company actually ran. They didn't kill unprofitable projects, watch where money went, and the author gives the impression that they didn't seem to properly invest in real products or ideas. He briefly mentions highering bright students and a few minor things, but most of the book doesn't mention that much about the development practices good or bad. For having a single product be such a cash cow you would think year after year they would try to improved their development and learn from their mistakes, but there is no mention of it. Also very little is mentioned of who the leads of development were as time went on as though developers don't really matter as long as you have some. For the main product that you live and die on you would think more attention would be spent on it. You can have horrible customer support if your software is fantastic. The lesson I got out of it would be to always consider the worse case. Although they wanted OS/2 to win if Windows won the worst case is that they would loose their cash cow. They should have started as soon as possible even if it meant paying a dozen developers on a dead end project. Heck start two completing sub companies to make a windows word perfect and pick the winner after X months, they had the money. With the extra money they should have taken their time on making new products doing it right rather then rushing out dozens of toy applications. New applications didn't need twenty languages and fancy boxes and manuals. Push it out there and see what worked, kill what didn't. It was only the luck of all the money of WP that allowed all of the mistake after mistake to be tried. Once DOS was over it was no surprise that it went south. I would much rather recommend a book less on luck and more on doing the right things as you will get a lot more out of it.