Silicon Valley high

ON the plane to India's cybercity, Bangalore, I read Michael Lewis's The New New Thing (Coronet). It was, I discovered, an appropriate choice for it is probably one of the best books written for a general audience about the world of hi-tech and more particularly Silicon Valley. Lewis builds the book around Jim Clark, the tall, good-looking Texan who is one of the heroes of the Infotech revolution. Clark, now in his fifties, was a disadvantaged child who seized every scrap of opportunity thrown his way before he finally came into his own. First at Silicon Graphics, and then at Netscape and finally at Healtheon, Clark came up with new products and services that rocked the world of industry and made him a billionaire.

In the book, he comes across as a compelling figure - a man whose vision knows no horizon, and whose appetite for big projects and big ideas is limitless. He is also a man of appetites we discover - sports cars, helicopters, yachts, horses. Indeed, the founder of Netscape appears to fit the stereotypical of an IT billionaire - a man who works as hard as he plays. But that is not all. Like most of the Silicon Valley pioneers (Steve Jobs comes to mind) Clark also typifies the engineer of genius who has no head for business. At every company, he founded he was in danger of being edged out by the managers who regarded him (sometimes with reason) as a loose cannon with a disregard for basic management practices. This often led to very tense battles in the boardroom that usually ended with Clark storming off to found yet another company.

Beyond the story of Jim Clark and how Netscape revolutionised the Internet, The New New Thing is of great interest for the way in which it shows how the new frontier of information technology became the most exciting place to be in the world. He tells the reader how engineers became the new whizkids, replacing MBA holders, bankers, venture capitalists and the like at centre- stage. The engineers were the superstars, and everyone else was reduced to being part of the supporting cast. It is fascinating stuff and Lewis handles his material well, never getting overly technical or too simplistic.

A smaller story that probably deserves a book to itself is the saga of Indian engineers who became especially sought after during the great Internet boom. Lewis profiles two such stars - Pavan Nigam from IIT Kanpur and Kittu Kolluri from Hyderabad - who became Jim Clark's key lieutenants as he bounced from big idea to big idea, project to project. They were the ones, who often fleshed out his ideas, wrote the software, headed up project teams - in short, helped make the vision work.

Lewis' book also makes interesting points about how the whole industry should be viewed in the right perspective. There is little doubt that the infotech revolution has and will continue to change the way the world works as profoundly as the industrial revolution did a hundred odd years ago. Fortunes will be made, people will grow used to a world that is materially different from the one their forefathers inherited but nothing new will last until it becomes relevant to the people it seeks to serve. In their search for the new, new thing, the author points out, this is what a number of highly touted Silicon Valley entrepreneurs forgot. No matter how brilliant a product or idea, unless it has enough customers, it will come to naught, or at any rate be limited to a select audience, which is not the best way to make a fortune or change the world. The fluctuations in the market have driven home this truth effectively. In the future, as vision and hard-headed commonsense fuse, there will be less trauma and more practicality. But while the excitement lasted, it was great to witness (especially if you did not hold ESOPs in the companies that went bust) and The New New Thing is an excellent record of those days.

DAVID DAVIDAR

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