I used to work at Microsoft, so Books About Microsoft are a popcorn pleasure. This one offers the pleasure of recognition; it's by, or half-by, or ghosted for, a programmer, and one who saw the whole thing as a more Mutt-and-Jeff success by semi-accident than an Organized Machiavellian Plot. I was a mere lowly cog and wouldn't have been let in on the OMP if there was one, but I sure didn't see much suggestive evidence.
Brainstem-level aggression, defending the franchise, yes, I remember that. Barbarians Led By Bill Gates is from the view of non-lowly cogs and suggests that that's all that was needed, given talented programmers and frequent mistakes by the opposition. I don't think one has to assume talented programmers, even, just programmers as good as the opposition's and mistakes less dire.
Since one of the authors was a programmer, and probably an excellent one, there is a clear assumption that the programmers were at the heart of it all: Heroic Midnight Sessions produce entire operating systems (well, nearly) that They Said Couldn't be Done, just in time to Confound IBM and Save the Company. These are my capitals. Edstrom & Eller are above capital letters, and also above the constant discussion of just how much money was or was going to be dependent on the keyboard heroics. This is quite tasteful and nearly unheard of in the genre of late-boom software-creation romances. (Bildungsroman? Compilungsroman!)
So wrote clew in Technology.