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Books : The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley StoryIn association with Amazon.comby: Michael Lewis  List Price: $14.00 Amazon.com's Price: $11.20 You Save: $2.80 (20%)Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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Binding: PaperbackDewey Decimal Number: 338.470053092 EAN: 9780140296464 ISBN: 0140296468 Label: Penguin (Non-Classics) Manufacturer: Penguin (Non-Classics) Number Of Items: 1 Number Of Pages: 288 Publication Date: January 01, 2001 Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) Release Date: January 08, 2001 Studio: Penguin (Non-Classics) Sales Rank: 45413 Related Items:
Editorial Review: Product Description: As American capitalism undergoes a seismic shift, Michael Lewis, author of the bestselling Liar's Poker, sets out on a Silicon Valley safari to find the true representative of the coming economic age. All roads lead to Jim Clark, the man who rewrote the rules of American capitalism as the founder of (so far) three multi-billion dollar companies-Silicon Graphics, Netscape, and Healtheon. Lewis's shrewd, often brilliantly funny, narrative provides ahead-of-the-curve observations about the Internet explosion and how the success of Silicon Valley companies is forcing a reassessment of traditional Wall-Street business models. Weaving Clark's story together with that of this new business phenomenon, Lewis has drawn us a map of markets and free enterprise in the twenty-first century and blown the lid off the changing economy. Amazon.com 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 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 Average Rating:
 Rating:  - Not a bad read, although nothing spectacularOne has to remember that this book was written during the burst of the Internet bubble. At that time, the general view is that the Internet bubble were purely speculative and would not have any lasting impact. Michael Lewis went against the conventional wisdom at the time and described in a series of tales the transformational powers of the web still being played out. The stories did not quite make a coherent whole. However, the observations were relevant. In terms of writing, this ... Read More Rating: - The BoatIt's all about the boat. Here, Michael Lewis follows the career of Jim Clark, founder of Silicon Graphics (now SGI), Netscape (now, well, something else) and then Healtheon (something else again.) Along the way Clark makes a zillion dollars and gets investment money as easily as turning on a tap. Although this book is quite old now (in terms of Internet years) the same basic lessons seem to be applicable in today's (well, until 2008s crash anyway) environment. That is, (a) suffer from ADD (or is it ... Read More Rating:  - Why Good Stories Are Better Than Bad Management BooksThis book could easily be transposed as an academic study in a scholarly journal or as a "how to" article in one of those business school reviews that cater to the deep anxieties of high-powered executives. The same material that Michael Lewis has collected could be used by an academic to formulate hypotheses, validate theories, and construct models of business behavior. In fact, a growing subset of management science deals with the phenomenon that Lewis describes in his narrative and that is known ... Read More Rating:  - What would you do if you researched a book and didn't find anything?I'm a big fan of Michael Lewis. He usually brings characters and situations to life and provides a perspective on a situation that introduces me to a new way of looking at things. That's not the case here. I get the feeling when Michael Lewis got permission to follow Jim Clark around for several months to write about him he thought he'd hit the mother load of great book material. Here was a guy who had traipsed through the daunting world of technology with a seeming Midas touch. Heck, ... Read More Rating: - A distorted view of Silicon Valley technology startups"The New New Thing" tells two stories. The first is the story of Jim Clark, a technical entrepreneur who founded three companies -- Silicon Graphics, Netscape, and Healtheon -- that achieved phenomenal heights during the Internet boom of the 1990's. Clark is, to say the least, an interesting character; at least two of Clark's business associates are quoted in the book calling him a "maniac". Clark is driven almost entirely by an unending greed, so for me at least, he quickly became an unsympathetic character ... Read More Browse for similar items by category:
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