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 computerized 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 startups 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-foot mast, 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 humor 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 ten 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
From Library Journal
Listeners are due for a thrilling ride through the strange landscape of computer geeks and billionaires, with a focus on the unique story of after-tax multibillionaire Jim Clark, founder of Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI), Netscape, and the newly emerging Healtheon. Lewis (Liar's Poker) focuses on Clark's story as the key to comprehending the newly emerging Internet wealth, emphasizing his battles between Netscape and Microsoft; his almost immediate success with SGI; his emotional investment in his computer-driven sailboat, the Hyperion; leading up to his next new, new thing, Healtheon, Clark's Internet health site envisioned literally to transform the $1 trillion healthcare industry. Clearly, Clark's nonpareil personae is an excellent example of how vastly different it is doing business in the age of the Internet, but this is not so much an analysis of Clark's business successes as it is a sort of technobiography. The numerous lengthy anecdotal tales and scenarios, narrated by Bruce Reizen, enrich the understanding of this exemplary personality, a high-tech rags-to-riches tale of a poor boy from Plainview, TX, but add little to a full appreciation for the strategies around these companiesDa story yet to be told. Highly recommended for all public libraries.DDale Farris, Groves, TX
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Lewis, in his eye-opening and best-selling Liar's Poker (1989), told tales on himself: about his meteoric rise from trainee at Salomon Brothers investment firm to very successful trader. Now he tells tales on someone else: Jim Clark, who created Netscape and thus "triggered the Internet boom." To write this profile, Lewis more or less shadowed Clark for a while, and dogging him meant participating in Clark's transatlantic journey in his obsessively designed, totally computerized sailing ship, Hyperion. Lewis' book, in effect, provides a look at the whole computer industry, for the more we learn about Clark, the more we learn about the industry as a whole. Silicon Valley, referred to as "the greatest legal creation of wealth in the history of the planet," is the Wall Street of the 1990s, and Clark is a primary mover and shaker. He is strictly an idea man, coming up with new ideas of how to make millions and leaving his engineers to arrive at workable details. Clark, as we follow and marvel at his career, invents his life as he goes along. What drives him is his abiding need to pursue new concepts and experiences. He is protypical of the superwealthy leadership in Silicon Valley: "the geek holed up in his basement all weekend discovering new things to do with his computer." That's the point of the Silicon Valley computer industry: people don't have to build new computers to make a fortune, they just have to devise new things for the computer to do. This book will prove very popular, not only with readers interested in business and computers but also with those who are simply curious about "the new new thing." Brad Hooper
Review
[A] superb book....[Lewis] makes Silicon Valley as thrilling and intelligible as he made Wall Street in his best-selling Liar's Poker.
About the Author
Michael Lewis grew up in New Orleans and has degrees from Princeton and the London School of Economics. Formerly a bond salesman with Salomon Brothers, he is the author of the runaway international bestseller, Liar's Poker. He holds an adjunct professorship at the University of California – Berkeley’s journalism school and lives in Berkeley with his wife, Tabitha Soren.
Michael Lewis's foray into Silicon Valley through a portrait of Netscape founder Jim Clark is an interesting look at one of the chief architects of the new economy and the collection of "geeks and billionaires" he calls friends. Tabbed as the book that does for Silicon Valley what LIAR'S POKER (another Lewis book) did for Wall Street, THE NEW NEW THING shows how brilliance can lead all at once to wonderful breakthroughs and ridiculous excess. Narrator Bruce Reizen does a commendable job of leading the listener through the lengthy look at a key pioneer in the Internet age, but the subject matter requires more than a passing interest in Silicon Valley to make it truly enjoyable. J.B.B. © AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine
New Growth Theory argued, in abstruse mathematics, that wealth came from the human imagination.Highlighted by 545 Kindle readers
