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''Renegades of the Empire'', Michael Drummond, 1999 ISBN 0-609-60416-3

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The first half of the book covers the development of DirectX and the second half focuses on the development of Chrome, which was a 3D extension to Internet Explorer.  The first half focuses on Eric Engstrom, Craig Eisler, and Alex St. John, who were collectively know as "The Beastie Boys".  The stories about St. John in particular are unbelievable, but apparently true.  The second half focuses primarily on Engstrom, who managed the Chrome effort.

I'm not objective here, since my team reported to Engstrom during Chrome development (we were a sister team of the Chrome team).  However, I found it an interesting read, and fairly accurate to the best of my somewhat limited knowledge.

One of the themes of the book is that innovating inside of Microsoft can be pretty difficult.  That's a useful subject to think about if you're trying to understand Microsoft's relationship to the rest of the industry.

-- CurtisBartley

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