Message from Dean - May 8th 2007

I am currently testing out a new version of the APF Bridge Component - If you notice any errors within this demo store please drop me a line.

Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 338.470053092
EAN: 9780393048131
ISBN: 0393048136
Label: W. W. Norton & Company
Manufacturer: W. W. Norton & Company
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 268
Publication Date: 1999-10
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Release Date: October 20, 1999
Studio: W. W. Norton & Company

---

Alternate Versions: Click to Display

Accessories:

• Casio Cassiopeia E-100 Palm-Size PC

Related Items:

• Liar's Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street
• The Money Culture
• Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
• Next: The Future Just Happened
• The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game
• see more

Browse for similar items by category:

• Books > Subjects > Biographies & Memoirs > Professionals & Academics > Business
• Books > Subjects > Biographies & Memoirs > General
• Books > Subjects > Biographies & Memoirs > General AAS
• Books > Subjects > Business & Investing > Industries & Professions > High-Tech
• Books > Subjects > Business & Investing > Small Business & Entrepreneurship > Entrepreneurship

---

Editorial Review:

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

Product Description:
The book that does for Silicon Valley what "Liar's Poker" did for Wall Street.

In the weird glow of the dying millennium, Michael Lewis sets out on a safari through Silicon Valley to find the world's most important technology entrepreneur, the man who embodies the spirit of the coming age. He finds him in Jim Clark, who is about to create his third, separate, billion-dollar company: first Silicon Graphics, then Netscape-which launched the Information Age-and now Healtheon, a startup that may turn the $1 trillion healthcare industry on its head.

Despite the variety of his achievements, Clark thinks of himself mainly as the creator of "Hyperion," which happens to be a sailboat . . . not just an ordinary yacht, but the world's largest single-mast vessel, a machine more complex than a 747. Clark claims he will be able to sail it via computer from his desk in San Francisco, and the new code may contain the seeds of his next billion-dollar coup.

On the wings of Lewis's celebrated storytelling, the reader takes the ride of a lifetime through this strange landscape of geeks and billionaires. We get the inside story of the battle between Netscape and Microsoft; we sit in the room as Clark tries to persuade the investment bankers that Healtheon is the next Microsoft; we get queasy as Clark pits his boat against the rage of the North Atlantic in winter. And in every brilliant anecdote and character sketch, Lewis is drawing us a map of markets and free enterprise in the twenty-first century.




Rating: - Not a bad read, although nothing spectacular
One 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 book does not compare favorably to the master piece "Liar's Poker." Therefore, I give it a 3 star.

---

Rating: - The Boat
It'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 ADHD?), and know when to spin the message way beyond hyperbole. Clark comes across as a super-intelligent hyperactive child. Had he been 15 years old, he'd have been put on a cocktail of drugs and told to sit in the corner and be quiet. Instead he's given hundreds of millions of dollars of investors money on business plans and ideas written on what feels like restaurant napkins. Lewis, the writer, seems to be dragged along for the ride hanging on for dear life.
Reading it now, after the ... Read More

---

Rating: - Why Good Stories Are Better Than Bad Management Books
This 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 in the academic literature as serial entrepreneurship.

In this respect, one could very well transform the portrait of Jim Clark into a diagram of the five abilities that a serial entrepreneur needs to cultivate:
- the ability to repeatably recognize a market. Jim Clark is after markets worth billions of dollars, and strives to stay ahead of the curve by identifying business opportunities that Microsoft has not yet seized.
- the ability to repeatably create a product or ... 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, the man had started Silicon Graphics and Netscape.

As I read the book, however, something strange happened, I started wondering, "When did Michael Lewis realize he was following the most improbably boring man in the world?" Jim Clark should be fascinating; he starts huge companies and turns venture capitalists on their ears, he flies helicopters, rides motorcycles and builds ludicrously complex, large and expensive sailboats. Jim Clark is a man who is never satisfied and always ... 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 around which to hang an entire book. Another criticism I have is that far too many pages of the book are spent on Clark's quest to build and debug Hyperion, the world's largest computer-controlled sailboat. These sections were a distraction from the rest of the narrative. (By the way, it's pretty clear that although they may have been smart, the people writing the software for Hyperion -- including Clark himself -- were all pretty lousy software engineers.)

The second story is ... Read More

---