Word: silicones
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Clark went on to found Silicon Graphics, Netscape and Healtheon, creating three multibillion-dollar companies. (So far.) I learned about Veblen--and loads about Clark--in Michael Lewis' new book, The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story (Norton; $25.95). It's a superb book and explains how engineers are the greatest creators of wealth in history and why Silicon Valley is the center of the universe (and how Clark came to be the center of the Valley). I tend to dislike most nonfiction, since so many writers approach their work as if they were doing the reader a favor...
Clark is the perfect Silicon Valley Man, though he was born "somewhere below the poverty line" in Plainview, Texas. His father abandoned the family when he was a child, and his mother should have been on welfare, but it "never occurred to her," Lewis writes. Clark, a classic malcontent, enlisted in the Navy after high school, was misevaluated and put in a class for especially slow delinquents, shipped out to sea, came back and was retested, this time scoring so well in math that it baffled his instructors...
...couple of marriages before reinventing himself and heading off to Stanford. There, he and his students designed a microchip he called the Geometry Engine, which allowed computers to visualize objects in 3-D. Fruitlessly, he tried to license the thing to IBM, DEC and Hewlett-Packard, before starting Silicon Graphics to sell workstations with the chip. That's where Clark honed his distaste for venture capitalists, whom he saw as stealing his enterprise and putting it in the hands of managers. Clark never let that happen again, keeping control when he got financing for Netscape and Healtheon...
...though, the company is soaring, and you don't hear much about the search for a permanent Apple CEO. Quite the contrary: 20 years after his quest began, Jobs is still chasing his dream of giving soul to silicon. Both Apple and Pixar embody his vision of the computer as an empowering cultural force that can help heal a rift between art and technology that's as old as art and technology themselves. For his '60s-era peers, high tech meant the cold, gray establishment that they were revolting against. Jobs knew better. "Leonardo da Vinci was a great artist...
...Jobs, taking a gentle swipe at Hollywood. Up north they don't read the movie trades first thing in the morning; they don't gossip about A-list parties. There are no megadollar contracts--except for Lasseter's. Don't imagine for a minute, however, that Jobs is a Silicon Valley apologist. He sees the beauty--and the beast--in both places. "What Silicon Valley thinks is creative is a bunch of guys sitting around on a beat-up old couch thinking up jokes," he says. "It's also true that Hollywood thinks technology is something you buy. Pixar...