Home > Work > The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story
1 " He was the guy who always won the game of chicken because his opponents suspected he might actually enjoy a head-on collision. "
― Michael Lewis , The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story
2 " We want to empower the doctors and patients to get all the other assholes out of the way,' Clark had once told me, then laughed. 'Except for us. One asshole in the middle. "
3 " His life was dedicated to the fine art of tearing down and building anew. "
4 " There is nothing more satisfying to me,” he said, “than to create a complete self-contained world when a computer is controlling it. "
5 " In something like an instant the man had changed his life. He reinvented his relationship to the world around him in a way that is considered normal only in California. "
6 " Clark liked to say that human beings, when they took risks, fell into one of two types, pigs or chickens. “The difference between these two kinds of people,” he’d say, “is the difference between the pig and the chicken in the ham-and-eggs breakfast. The chicken is interested, the pig is committed. If you are going to do anything worth doing, you need a lot of pigs.” The "
7 " Microsoft had made it clear that the only way to preserve your station in Valley life was to create a monopoly. If you created a monopoly, you were at least partially exempt from the ordinary rapid cycle of creation and destruction. "
8 " He had little patience for the mystical, spiritual approach of computer programming. "
9 " a thousand people don’t build anything; if you need to build something really complicated really fast, you hire fifty of the smartest people you can find. "
10 " Lance was to computer programming what Joyce was to literature, possibly profound but also baffling. "
11 " The trouble was that clarity and simplicity were more important in computer language than in human language. "
12 " Success was his chosen form of revenge. "
13 " there must be some connection between his excessively romantic attitude toward computer programming and his appeal to women. "
14 " With every stroke of their keyboards they hacked a path through the forest that others would be required to follow. "
15 " The computer programmer creates the only path available to the computer user; the effect of his decisions on others is masked by their abstraction. "
16 " Microsoft was twelve years old before people started talking about Microsoft millionaires; Netscape was one and a half. "
17 " This gorgeous financial myopia was common in the Valley, and one of the chief sources of its success. "
18 " The technologist’s tendency to commit all his resources to new technology, "
19 " This was only one of many recent changes along the capitalist food chain. Wall Street had gone from being the celebrities of the money culture to being its lackeys. "
20 " For a technology company to succeed, he argued, it needed always to be looking to destroy itself. If it didn’t, someone else would. "