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The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story
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Author: Michael Lewis
List Price: $13.00
Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price
ISBN: 0140296468
Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) (08 January, 2001)
Edition: Paperback
Sales Rank: 8,824
Average Customer Rating: 3.79 out of 5
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Customer ReviewsRating: 5 out of 5
A Silicon Valley Story
I really enjoyed the story line here. Jim Clark was portrayed as a man who had vision, yet the desire to never be "locked in" to something for too long. One might wonder if all of the time spent dealing with the Board of Silicon Graphics made him change his behavior. I do not agree with some of the posts here stating that the author lives and breathes on the words of Jim Clark. He was a business man that believed there were opportunities and quickly acted upon them. Like everything else, there will always be great and poor business decisions from a leader. No one is an exception here; including Mr. Gates. So, back to the review; this is an excellent book to give folks an insight into the crazy late 90's, where business vision was accelerated 10 fold. Some big successes and many failure stories.
Rating: 5 out of 5
Multi-entrepreneur Jim Clark - Genius and/or madman???
Michael Lewis is the author of several entertaining books, such as Liar's Poker (1989), Next: The Future Just Happened (2001), Moneyball (2003).The author explains that it was not his intention to write an autobiography about Jim Clark, but he was trying to capture the entrepreneurial spirit of Silicon Valley. However, due to the amazing enthusiasm of multiple entrepreneur Jim Clark Lewis ends up following Clark. Jim Clark, who originally was a technology professor, is the first person to start 3 companies that each exceed a market valuation of $1 billion each: Silicon Graphics, Netscape, Healtheon. The book starts with the maiden trial of Jim Clark's multi-million dollar yacht 'Hyperion'. This enormous yacht is full of (ridiculous) technology and should be able sail on its own. The trial of the 'Hyperion' is just the start of an almost endless list of crazy, wild stories about technology companies, Internet start-ups, and IPOs'. The author seems to have trouble keeping up with Jim Clark's ideas and (true) stories. Yes, I do like this book. Although it mainly focuses on multi-entrepeneur Jim Clark, it also describes the stories behind various Internet-companies (AOL, Yahoo!, Microsoft, etc.) and the Internet bubble. The writing style of the author is extremely entertaining, while still containing lots of information and facts. The book feels like a rollercoaster, but it is great fun!! I recommend it highly.
Rating: 1 out of 5
disgusting portrait of greed and conceit
I've enjoyed other books my Michael Lewis (esp. Liar's Poker) but this one was sickening. He treats every action and word from Jim Clark as manna from heaven, apparently on the basis that Jim Clark is rich, therefore he must be a genius. One hopes that the 97% slide in Healtheon's stock may have set him straight on this. This book was [hard] to read in 2000. By now there might be a certain unintentional humor in reading this kind of pandering, knowing better, but a couple of hundred pages of it is probably more black humor than you need. For actual information about silicon valley and the dotcom era, try High Stakes, No Prisoners by Charles Ferguson, or Nudist on the Late Shift, by Po Bronson.
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