Breaking Windows was written from transcripts of emails that were made public in the antitrust trial, that offer a glimpse of how Microsoft works, in the words of Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Jim Allchin, Brad Silverberg, Paul Maritz, Ben Slivka and hundreds of other Microsoft people, while the wars with Sun, Netscape, and the US government were raging.

Sometime in the next couple of weeks an excerpt of the book will appear in the Wall Street Journal, and David has kindly allowed us to run an excerpt on Scripting News after that. I've been working in the same ecosystem as Microsoft since 1979, and even so, this book opened my eyes in a new way. I gave my review copy to a friend I trust, who also watches Microsoft, and his eyes were opened too. Now I have more meaningful conversations with current and ex-Microsoft people. I have a better idea of how their sausage factory works.

But most people outside Microsoft remain as clueless as ever. In many ways Bank's book is a clearer roadmap of what awaits the technology industry than any keynote given by Bill Gates. If you want to understand how the technology economy works, it's a must-read.

This mailing list is where interested people can discuss the Bank book.

Dave Winer