Michael Lewis Profiles Jim Clark in NY Times

GrokSoup writes "Magnificently loopy -- and spot-on -- profile of Jim Clark in Sunday's NY Times Magazine. In it, writer Michael Lewis manages to make the profoundly unsympathetic multibillionaire Clark at least somewhat sympathetic, while simultaneously dissecting the venture capital food chain, getting inside the Valley culture, describing Clark's many missteps, and generally doing a yeoman job of promoting his upcoming book. Read it." Great stuff! Up there with The Soul of a New Machine, but about the financial side of things. I strongly second GrokSoup's "read it."

Comments

The Neurosis of Late 20th C. Capitalism

[Anonymous Coward]

Everybody hates Microsoft,
But wants in on the Next Microsoft (TM).

Jim Clark's first job

[Anonymous Coward]

At least the first one I know of was at The New York Institute of Technology's Computer Graphics Lab. NYIT was a great place to be (if you were at the Lab, not if you were a student), and an astonishing number of people who went on to become the core of computer graphics worked there in the late seventies and early eighties.

The Lab was a completely anarchic group of researchers, doing whatever we could think of with some of the best toys available at the time. Becasue of the lack of focus, many blind alleys were explored, but on the other hand many interesting discoveries were made.

Clark blew into NYIT like a whirlwind, with a bunch of ideas for doing all sorts of things, mostly combinations of custom hardware and software (in that era, most interesting work required building of custom hardware, as the general purpose computers were expensive, big, and slow). I remember several times when Jim was whaling away at a whiteboard, drawing stuff, trying to get people interested in building his latest dream. And they were good ideas, in general, but it was hard to get people interested.

The end of the era came when Clark wrote a letter to Evans and Sutherland, describing some ideas he had, and suggesting that maybe he could work better there than at Tech. Somebody stole the letter from the line printer queue, and forwarded it to the Chancellor of the school, and Clark was given his walking papers immediately. It's one of many poor business decisions that NYIT made, but in perfect synchrony with all of the others.

AC for today -- I'd love to work with Clark again if the job was right :)

Where's the beef?

[LL]

Is technology suppose to make your life easier or harder? I sure hope those supra-geniuses can come up with stuff that us normal sub-par users can use to explain stuff to joe-blog consumers. The claim of getting $20K x 700K doctors = $14 B/year is a little optimistic. In my personal observation, for every $10 of IT money,

$1 = hardware
$2 = software
$3 = operations/maintenance
$4 = ongoing training and helpdesk

So while the company might be looking at the cream, the hospital system is probably having a hernia about feeding the whole cow. The bottom line is does the cost of technology (minus hype) less than the improvments in productivity/profitability? Otherwise it becomes a financial black-hole and adoption rates will be marginal after the early adopters get burnt. Peter Drucker (that famous management guru) once visited a hardware manufacturer which created handdrills - he spent the day listening to employees crowing that variable speed, multi-bit this, retractable cords, various do-dackys, etc. When asked for his opinion, he replied .... your customers are interested in holes not powertools.

The trap that too many smart people (and it appears the company is full of them) is that they assume everyone else around is them equally smart. Sure doctors may be, but only in their speciality. Unfortunately as the Holloween documents note, simplicity means low-entry barriers which destroys the value of software sold as a product. Hence the rather unconcious need to produce something too difficult for the competition to replicate.

Software development at this early life-form sorta reminds me of the oil-well discovery stage where the intent (and high payoffs) was the wildcat teams sinking and discovering the black gold. However, if you compare those cowboy days and today's modern energy infrastructure and distribution networks, there is an incredible difference. So before we sacrifice the sacred IPO cow on the altar of reality, I hope people, especially the new group of geeks keen to show off their prowess, keep in mind that if its something your mother can't use, then nobody will use it.

LL