Product Description

Bestselling author Michael Lewis sets out to discover the world's most important technology entrepreneur, the man who embodies the spirit of the coming age. He finds him in Jim Clark, the billionaire who is about to create his third, separate, billion-dollar company: first Silicon Graphics; then Netscape, which launched the information age; and now Healtheon, which aims to turn the $1 trillion US health care industry on its head. Accompanying Clark on the maiden voyage of his vast computerised yacht, Lewis tells the story of the battle between Netscape and Microsoft. Through every brilliant anecdote and funny character sketch, Lewis allows us an inside look at the world of the super-rich, whilst drawing a map of free enterprise in the twenty-first century. Prepare to be taken on the ride of a lifetime through this strange landscape of stormy seas, netheads and billionaires.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #330785 in Books
• Published on: 2001-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: .70" h x 5.05" w x 7.75" l, .48 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Amazon.co.uk 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 computerised 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 start-ups 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-footmast, 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 humour 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 10 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,Amazon.com

About the Author
Michael Lewis is a former banker who worked at Salamon Brothers in the height of Eighties boom. He writes regularly as a journalist and is the author of several books, including the international bestseller, LIAR'S POKER.