Not So New Thing
SKINNER, DAVID
Not So New Thing Michael Lewis misses his chance to write the great book about Silicon Valley. BY DAVID SKINNER Michael Lewis’s The New New Thing isn’t, as its title suggests, about the search...
...His present wife is mentioned, briefly...
...It is a testament to the power and flexibility of American capitalism that a handful of engineers, most of them foreigners, led by a wild-eyed entrepreneur, could foist themselves on anything so complex as our health care system...
...Once the business types took over that company, Clark, working with a young programmer fresh from the University of Illinois, went on to found Netscape in 1994, which became the benchmark for the new Internet browser market...
...The only thing I can do is start [companies].’ His role in the Valley was suddenly clear: he was the author of the story...
...One gets the feeling that Lewis is really just phoning it in—making in-theknow comments for his in-the-know readers...
...The talent that the government [of India] had gone to such trouble to find and cultivate wound up being some of the most sought-after corporate employees on the planet...
...For The New New Thing—the title phrase is used so often in the book it quickly becomes an old old thing— Lewis didn’t look far into Clark’s life...
...But it forces the reader to treat everything in The New New Thing with suspicion...
...Some of its riffs, especially the jungle metaphors and lascivious imagery employed by bond traders to describe their accomplishments, enjoyed a fame of their own...
...A drop-out from high school, Clark signed up for the Navy, where it was discovered that he had some serious mathematical talent...
...Thus does Lewis allude to his old beat, where as a young writer, he risked a lot to tell a first-rate story...
...Rather, it’s a book-length magazine profile of Jim Clark, the man who founded Silicon Graphics, Netscape, and Healtheon, and his search for that new new thing...
...It comes easily because Lewis likes Clark and doesn’t want to say anything too damning about him...
...If only the rest of the book were so pointed and well examined...
...After getting a Ph.D...
...Even Jim Clark seemed tired of it once its long-awaited Atlantic crossing was underway...
...in computer science from the University of Utah, he “married at least twice, sired at least two children, moved back and forth across the country at least three times, and held at least four different jobs, mainly at universities...
...Now Lewis has joined the race to write The Great Book about the computer industry...
...Such “practical matters” come up often...
...This kind of writing, beloved by the authors of magazine profiles, cannot explain what a person is really like...
...But 1990s Silicon Valley, he feels compelled to write, makes “1980s Wall Street seem like the low-stakes poker table...
...machine complete with images readers can see...
...Describing Clark’s role in Healtheon, a business that facilitates medical transactions, Lewis writes, “He was attached to the business in the same way that Jack Nicholson was attached to a film script—thus increasing the likelihood that the script will become a movie...
...But Hyperion, as it was christened, was a boat no sailor could take seriously...
...As a practical matter,” Lewis writes, “Clark had no past, only a future...
...BY DAVID SKINNER Michael Lewis’s The New New Thing isn’t, as its title suggests, about the search for the next great intellectual or commercial breakthrough...
...Clark “once told me,” Lewis writes, “‘I can’t be a venture capitalist, because I’m not that kind of person, and I can’t be a manager because I’m not that kind of person...
...Indeed, he shows his desire on the first page, with an epigraph from Ezra Pound: “The age demanded an image of its accelerated grimace...
...For his bestselling Liar’s Poker, Michael Lewis went to great lengths to illuminate the complicated story of the changes in federal law and the financial mechanisms that shuttled money into bonds and made a small group of men rich...
...His adult life prior to his entering the computer business comes off in a twopage dash, expanded later with some less-than-complete commentary from Clark’s mother and sister...
...The other notable chapter profiles three engineers, two of them Indian, who went to work starting up Healtheon for Clark...
...He’s a wealth-creation David Skinner is an associate editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...The New New Thing is a familiar bit of high-tech cheerleading, by a writer too sophisticated to let on that he has traded in his wicked pen for a set of pom-poms...
...He didn’t let Lewis in either, and so the reader gets lavish descriptions of Clark’s land, air, and sea adventures instead of an account of how this man’s mind works...
...And so Lewis presents Jim Clark as the quintessential Silicon Valley figure, which may be fair enough: Clark talks a big game, plays a big game—having started three multibillion dollar companies—and best of all, he loves material things: not just software or hardware, but airplanes, boats, and houses...
...The author of The New New Thing, Michael Lewis, first came to public notice in 1989 as the twentynineyear-old shark who wrote Liar’s Poker, a superb insider’s account of Salomon Brothers, the Wall Street firm that dominated the 1980s bond market...
...His first wife and a son are mentioned, but presumably weren’t interviewed...
...Two chapters, however, stand out...
...Simply by floating around and taking an interest, he makes all involved feel as if they are engaged in something very special...
...Clark, teaching at Stanford at the time, designed the chip that made possible the easy manipulation of three-dimensional graphics on computers, and, in the early 1980s, he started Silicon Graphics, the firm that remade Hollywood’s special effects...
...Yet Lewis spends over forty pages on it...
...Lewis writes at one point that Clark wouldn’t let Wall Street types into “his sacred world of machines...
...Clark wanted Netscape to go public long before it had made any profit so he’d have the cash to buy an enormous, computerized yacht...
...With the very first chapter, “The Boat That Built Netscape,” Lewis begins to exploit this advantage...
...The Department of Justice’s case against Microsoft, carried out largely on Netscape’s behalf, required a court appearance by Clark—and provided an occasion for Lewis to demonstrate his talent for capturing a scene filled with opposition, winners, losers, and rules that make the game intelligible...
...Eighteen months later, on August 9, 1995, the initial public offering of Netscape shares traded at $12, reaching $48 by the end of the day and $140 just three months later...
...And then one day in 1978, everything changed...
Vol. 5 • November 1999 • No. 10
