Former Microsoft executive Steven Sinofsky is writing a book about his time running the firm’s Office and Windows businesses. If it’s anything like his blog posts, it will be overly wordy and resilient to feedback.

News of the book—to be called Hardcore Software: Inside the Rise and Fall of the PC Revolution if Sinofsky ever finishes it—comes via an interview at Fast Company, which also published an excerpt related to the 20-year-old ILOVEYOU virus.

“I wrote the stories to be mostly timeless lessons, told in the context of rich details of the growing and maturing PC industry,” he says of the book. “Two themes kept recurring for me. First, ‘no matter what happens, someone always said it would.’ What I mean by this is that in technology there’s always a relentless push to improve and define what is next, which means that at any given moment, no matter how well things are going, someone somewhere is always shouting that the next big thing is here right now and everything we know is going to change … the second idea is [that] the vast majority of time these forces (‘disruptive forces,’ if you will) are viewed through the lens of a product and technology.”

Sinofsky said he waited to write the book so that he could “de-Microsoft” himself to gain perspective, filter out the noise, and reflect on what he could have gone better. That must have taken a while.

Hardcore Software is Sinofsky’s second book. His first, One Strategy: Organization, Planning, and Decision Making, details his take on strategy and operational execution during the development of Windows 7 and is mind-numbingly hard to read.

Regardless, I’ll have to pick up the new book when it’s available. I can’t ignore something like this.

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