The New New Thing – A Silicon Valley Story - Softcover

Lewis, Michael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393347818 ISBN 13: 9780393347814

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2014

Synopsis

In the weird glow of the dying millennium, Michael Lewis set out on a safari through Silicon Valley to find the world s most important technology entrepreneur. He found this in Jim Clark, a man whose achievements include the founding of three separate billion-dollar companies. Lewis also found much more, and the result the best-selling book The New New Thing is an ingeniously conceived history of the Internet revolution."

About this title

Review:

Michael Lewis was supposed to be writing about how Jim Clark, the founder of Silicon Graphics and Netscape, was going to turn health care on its ear by launching Healtheon, which would bring the vast majority of the industry's transactions online. So why was he spending so much time on a computerised yacht, each feature installed because, as one technician put it, "someone saw it on Star Trek and wanted one just like it?"

Much of The New New Thing, to be fair, is devoted to the Healtheon story. It's just that Jim Clark doesn't do start-ups the way most people do. "He had ceased to be a businessman", as Lewis puts it, "and become a conceptual artist." After coming up with the basic idea for Healtheon, securing the initial seed money and hiring the people to make it happen, Clark concentrated on the building of Hyperion, a sailboat with a 197-footmast, whose functions are controlled by 25 SGI workstations (a boat that, if he wanted to, Clark could log onto and steer--from anywhere in the world). Keeping up with Clark proves a monumental challenge--"you didn't interact with him", Lewis notes, "so much as hitch a ride on the back of his life"--but one that the author rises to meet with the same frenetic energy and humour of his previous books, Liar's Poker and Trail Fever.

Like those two books, The New New Thing shows how the pursuit of power at its highest levels can lead to the very edges of the surreal, as when Clark tries to fill out an investment profile for a Swiss bank, where he intends to deposit less than .05 percent of his financial assets. When asked to assess his attitude toward financial risk, Clark searches in vain for the category of "people who sought to turn 10 million dollars into one billion in a few months" and finally tells the banker, "I think this is for a different ... person." There have been a lot of profiles of Silicon Valley companies and the way they've revamped the economy in the 1990s--The New New Thing is one of the first books fully to depict the sort of man that has made such companies possible. --Ron Hogan,Amazon.com

Review:

The most significant business story since the days of Henry Ford. . . . Lewis achieves a novelistic elegance.

Remarkable. . . . Clark proves to be a character as enthralling as any in American fiction or non-fiction. . . . [A] great story . . . with prose that ranges from the beautiful to the witty to the breathtaking.--Fred Moody

A splendid, entirely satisfying book, intelligent and fun and revealing and troubling in the correct proportions, resolutely skeptical but not at all cynical.--Kurt Andersen

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0393347818
• ISBN 13: 9780393347814
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272