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Summary: Highlights the new workings in Silicon Valley
Review: In high risk information based businesses people use names and reputations to make decisions. Fashion and Movies are two examples where the name "Aramani" or "Julia Roberts" will make a product or company a success.In the "New New Thing" Lewis shows that this process has happened in the buying and selling of High Tech companies (if not their products) and he shows how Jim Clark got rich based upon his reputation. The book gives a good and fairly candid view of Clark. I felt that Lewis kept his distance from the subject and avoided being swept up in the hype of Clark driven companys. Lewis's writing is fresh and enjoyable. The stories about how High Tech companies get started and how VC's and engineers work together to create companies were interesting and informative. Lewis focuses entirely on Clark, so it is difficult to tell if Clark's ability to make money based on his name is limited to him, or if there are others who are achieving the Rock Star status he has. Overall well worth reading.
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Summary: Jim Clark, the Pied Piper of Silicon Valley
Review: Jim Clark, the founder of Silicon Graphics and Netscape, cashed in $3 million of his stock to build a house. If kept, that stock would have grown to $300 million, "the fastest money ever made legally." No wonder people followed Clark into his new venture, Heatheon, which was supposed to overhaul the paperwork processing of the medical industry with Clark's company in the middle of the flow. Along the way to success, Clark collected many driving, flying and sailing machines, which he loved to operate and fix, but mostly tear down and upgrade. To Clark the future was a continual search for the new new thing. "The New New Thing" is the story of how three multi-billion dollar business enterprises were not enough for a man who's vision of the future pushed engineers, accountants, venture capitalists, the rest of the computer industry, as well as the general public, into taking a flying leap into the future. Michael Lewis will entertain you with a cast of colorful characters who brought computers and Internet access into nearly every American household and with the hanger-ons who became millionaires in the process. Your eyes will open wide to how Silicon Valley operates on the theory of planned obsolescence, and you'll see enough back stabbing and espionage to conclude that modern businesses are still old-fashioned when piles of money are involved.
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Summary: A Silicon Valley Story
Review: 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.
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Summary: Entertaining writing, little substance
Review: Michael Lewis books are a pleasure to read for their humor, wit and eloquence that easily communicates what is, at first blush, arcane. The New New Thing is no exception. It's an entertaining piece which puts the current internet age in perspective. But while Lewis, puts things in perspective, he does not undertake the most difficult task of explaining relevance. Certain aspects of life have become more easy and fast due to the net. But has anyone figured out a way to produce profits that are not currently done more effectively? He mentions several times that internet-related companies supported by Silicon Valley have achieved a wealth creation unparalleled in history. But this wealth is in paper (stock certificates) form, the value of which can't be measured. Netscape for all its sound and fury never produced a profit. Healtheon for its all its bluster still did not really know its product at its IPO. Even Jim Clark, the books principal did not believe that Yahoo was worth $30 billion. I wish that Lewis would have attempted to address these issues rather than just mention their existence. He spent too much time dwelling about Hyperion which served as a good symbol of the creativity, logic, recklessness, and vanity of Silicon Valley, but did not shed much light on meaning.
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Summary: Not as good as Liars poker
Review: Very well written but gives an insight into Clark's life more than an insight into Silicon Valley. Reads more like a biography and does not capture the wheeling dealing in Silicon Valley whcih the reader might have expected to see.
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Summary: A Silicon Valley Story
Review: 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.
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Summary: Multi-entrepreneur Jim Clark - Genius and/or madman???
Review: 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.
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Summary: disgusting portrait of greed and conceit
Review: 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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Summary: A New Way to Look At the Business World
Review: Lewis takes what would be a boring subject to most people and turns it into an interesting and creative book. Lewis combines the history of the Internet and a narrative to create a book that teaches readers about the business world. Since this book was not just history, it made me interested in what Lewis was writing about. "The New New World" is about Jim Clark setting out to conform his business to the coorporate world he is competing against. Clark is the founder of three multi-billion dollar companies and must compete against other multi-billion dollar companies such as Microsoft to stay successful. Through this book you are able to see the business world in a new light. It is not what some people might see it as. "The New New World" is an intriging book that changes the conventional thinking to a new world of thinking through the mind of Jim Clark. It is a good book that combines the business world, economics and a narrative to create a book that allows readers to see the new way to look at the business world.
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Summary: Boat Obession & future ideas
Review: I found the book New New Thing to be quite interesting about Jim Clark's ideas and how he took them beyond thoughts and turned them into reality ahead of their time. Michael Lewis wrote the book in a manner that was different from what I am used to reading. The story jumped around from the sailboat, Clark's childhood, to the venture capitalist and engineers involved in Clark's businesses back to the boat and again about his personal life with his family. If I were a person looking to read a book about the technology ideas of Clark's I would have to say that this would not be the book. It comes across as a 'soap opera'.
However, I did enjoy reading how Clark founded the companies Netscape and Healtheon. He is a very determined individual and does not put up with people standing in his way. He has the guts to do what he wants to do. You learn how Clark made millions from ideas that others thought would not. I found it to be an enjoyable read about technology and Silicon Valley. And finally, Clark was somewhat successful in sailing his boat across the ocean to the states, with many glitches with the computers and some human interaction.
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