基本信息·出版社：Penguin (Non-Classics) ·页码：266 页 ·出版日期：2000年12月 ·ISBN：0140296468 ·条形码：9780140296464 ·版本：第1版 ·装帧： ...
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The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story |
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The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story |
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基本信息·出版社：Penguin (Non-Classics)
·页码：266 页
·出版日期：2000年12月
·ISBN：0140296468
·条形码：9780140296464
·版本：第1版
·装帧：平装
·开本：32
·正文语种：英语
·外文书名：新新事物:硅
内容简介 在线阅读本书
《The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story (新新事物:硅)》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 ——This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
作者简介 Michael Lewis is the author of several books, including the international bestseller Liar's Poker and The Money Culture. He has been the American editor of the British weekly The Spectator and a senior editor at The New Republic. Lewis lives in Paris, France, with his wife, Tabitha Soren, and their newborn daughter.
媒体推荐 "May be to Silicon Valley what Pepys's diary was to 1660s London or Twain's Rouqhinq it to the American West of the last century."
——The New York Times Book Review, front cover
"The most significant business story since the days of Henry Ford."
——The Boston Globe
"Remarkable... Lewis telts a great story, with prose that ranges from the beautiful to the witty to the breathtaking."
——The Wail Street Journal
编辑推荐 《The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story (新新事物:硅)》是Michael Lewis编写的，由福光出版社出版发行。
目录 Preface xv
1 The Boat That Built Netscape
2 The Accelerated Grimace
3 The Past in a Box
4 Disorganization Man
5 nventing Jim Clark
6 The Boom and the Mast
7 Throwing Sand in Capitalists' Eyes
8 The Great Brain Quake of August 9, 1995
9 The Home of the Future?
10 God Mode
11 How Chickens Become Pork
12 New New Money
13 Cheese Sandwiches for Breakfast
14 Could Go Either Way
15 At Sea in the Home of the Future
16 Chasing Ghosts
17 The Turning Point
18 The New New Thing
19 The Past outside the Box
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
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文摘 None of this made any sense to anyone who had not pro-grammed the computer. But the general drift was now at least clearto me: the problem might be not in the engine but in the softwarethat controlled the engine. Clark thought that the crude comput-ers attached to the engine-known as PLCs, for programmablelogic controllers-could be transmitting bad data to the fancy Sil-icon Graphics machines in the computer room. He thought thatthe computers had wrongly perceived something wrong with theengine, and so switched the engine off. A problem in the softwareimplicated Steve, but only in a general way. The PLCs had beenprogrammed by some Dutch guys back in the boatyard. The pro-gramming of PLCs was meant to be trivial, which was why the jobhad been left to the Dutch guys in the first place. Steve and Jim were well on their way to a long, baffling conver-sation about the boat's software, but before they could get therethe engine started up. The boat stopped pitching madly. It cut withrenewed purpose through the sea. The engine, it seemed, had a mindof its own. Then Robert appeared with a sneaky smile on his face.All by himself, without telling anyone, he'd woken up, clambereddown to the engine room, blown out the sea chest, and started upthe engine. Now, however, he conceded that he could not swear hehad fixed the deeper problem, since he was not sure what thedeeper problem was. But at least the boat was running again. Clarkand Steve returned to the bridge; this time Robert followed. Up top, in front of the four big computer screens, Clark com-plained about the state of his art. "Steve, something is really fuckingthese computers up," he said. Steve muttered something aboutthere being a lot more work to do. Clark then hit the button thatpulled up the map of the world, with Hyperion on it. Its accuracyhad actually slipped since the trials in the North Sea. The boat ap-peared on the map as a blue scaphoid. At that moment, accordingto the computer, we were cruising just nort
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