Indeed, he "wrote the book" on it, which is apparently freely available as PDF now [1].
As someone who knows nothing about OS's, I picked up a cheap copy out of curiosity, and found it highly readable and enlightening (until it got rained on somewhere around chapter 10).
EDIT: Do you have a link to the "fails" talk? I've been using Azure for the last few months and have been extremely impressed so far.
[1] https://www.google.com/#q=windows+internals+russinovich+pdf
ps: hope the things shared in the one before last episode are now completely over. My best wishes.
Regarding other people, certainly many are worth following. It'd be remiss not to mention Erik Meijer's group or the work done by others in MSR. They make for great Channel9 videos and great papers when they publish. But when I go to or watch a MSFT conference, those 3 are the top names I look for. Fair enough?
http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Speakers/Mark-Russinovich
Thanks for the reference -- always interested in watching frank talks about software failure.
Gosh I have such a nerd crush on him. Easily my favourite language designer, by far. I wish I could be him, and funnily enough am learning language design outside of work, but I highly doubt I'll ever be as good!
* Anders Hejlsberg
* Mark Russinovich
* Scott Hanselman
They have the clout and the job security to speak their mind - and they do. They all work on neat projects and are interested in talking about the internals. I saw Mark at Build this year and his talk was about the "fails" of Azure. It was an honest breakdown of how they've had failures that have taken down customers, taken down Microsoft services, and hurt the reputation of Azure.
I've followed Mark's blog since before he became a Technical Fellow at Microsoft, and he deserved it, no doubt. Very few people could write or speak with such precision about the internals of Microsoft kit. His interviews on Channel9 are all fascinating, before Azure he did work on the NT Kernel (and who knows what else) and he spoke candidly about dealing with issues scaling up the operating system. He has given interviews solely about removing global locks from the kernel, because that's his domain and he's good at it. If that reminded me of anyone else, it would be Linus Torvalds and his intimate knowledge of the Linux kernel.