by
Po Bronson
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Now the ironmen had always believed in the principle that what made them special was their raw brainpower, not their acquired knowledge. Anybody could study a subject, learn the details, develop expertise. The way they usually talked about it was that their brainpower was indivisible and transferable. It didn't matter what project you worked on so long as it challenged your mind. A true ironman could prove himself equally as adept at designing a digital satellite router as network software. Hank had instilled this doctrine specifically to prevent the ironmen from worrying about falling behind - if you've got the treasured commodity, you can always catch up. But the whole hubbub around the 686 project undermined this. Quite abruptly, the project you were on mattered, and dearly. Under these new rules, a little fear of falling behind was hard to keep from blooming into an all-out paranoia.
not wrong
But Darrell's reasoning was slightly more subtle,- he recognized that almost all computer geeks got their first look at a computer through some kind of computer game. Darrell believed that games transformed the box from a work tool to a plaything, and thereby burned a positive association into the hard wiring of a future geek's brain. Games taught people to love their computers, and once in love they continued to explore the other features and uses available. They became curious. By contrast, most ordinary people in office buildings first use a computer as a word processor. They aren't very curious to explore what else can be done with the thing. Curiosity, Darrell insisted, was the all-important key that unlocked the many doors the computer could take you to. Only curiosity would drive those young students in schools to stay an extra hour at the end of the day and explore the internet. Darrell feared that if students just used their VWPCs as study tools, VWPCs would get about as positive an image as textbooks - heavy tomes we want to burn to a charred crisp right after final exams.
true
But then some muckety-mucks had a meeting and made a decision that any software running on the Falcon had to be able to run on old Omega computers as well - computers that didn't use parallel processing. They installed a new software upgrade, but it didn't support parallel processing. What did all this mean? For most of those two million customers, one of the two chips was being wasted! Literally, it never even felt an electrical signal. It waited, dormant as a bear in hibernation. Yet people had paid for them. People were being ripped off, and they had no idea. As far as they knew, they had bought the top of the line. Their Falcons were still fast, since even that one active 486 chip was faster than the previous design. There were also numerous other advancements in the Falcon that kept customers happy: the motherboard circuitry was far more efficient, and little memory closets, called caches, were used on every card and chip. But the net result was that the standard Falcon sold by Omega was only a little more than half as fast as Francis had designed it. Half as fast. Imagine buying a new Porsche and finding out it only goes forty miles per hour! The real tragedy was this same dynamic was true for most of Omega's competitors. They were selling computers with chips inside that weren't being fully utilized. They were all afraid to sell software that wouldn't run on older machines. It was a marketing decision - and that said it all. These were marketing companies now, not really computer companies. Years ago, in the seventies and even through the mid-eighties, the chip companies actually built their own chips in their own labs, and software companies wrote their own software, et cetera. But in the nineties, much of what the public thought of as computer companies were just shell companies with dominant sales forces and advertising budgets. Most of their CEOs were middle-aged guys with MBAs and a few years under their belt building toothpaste market share for Procter &. Gamble. They grew by acquiring outright all the shares of new start-ups. They paid others to design the heavy iron.
Then they had dumbed down his chip.
The ultimate indignity.
classic
Every self-respecting young man in Silicon Valley had considered the fantasy at one time or another. You could be pulling down a six-figure salary at Apple or Oracle you could have two patents registered under your own name . . . . . you could have a division of programmers under your command and it didn't count for nothing unless you had taken a crack at the big spin. You had to know: 'Could I do it?' It was easy for an older guy like Francis Benoit to ridicule the romance of a start-up, but if you were thirty, like Tiny, or twenty-nine, like Salman, you suspected that you'd never really lived if you hadn't done it at least once. They were always looking for the chance. And what constituted a chance? A decent idea and a team big enough to do the work fast but small enough to survive on credit cards. How many chances would they get like this? Darrell, meanwhile, had tried and failed once before, and he was just gaining enough distance on the experience to see the mistakes he had made. And so he was wondering, What if I . . . don't repeat those mistakes!
Conrad Goss chuckled and leaned back. 'Don't look at I don't know tech from tock.' He chuckled at that a little. 'Tech from tock not bad. But I take Travis's advice on the technology, and what he says is you guys got something on fire here. Red hot. Sure I read magazines, tool around online, try to stay up to speed. But you guys, you're on the inside. Wow, I would love to be twenty-five again, I'd do it differently. I got no kids, see? What am I going to do with my money? I got eight million bucks - it's bought me nothing. I wasted my life auditing public utilities, nuclear power, hydro power, all xs and os. Spreadsheets debits and credits. Thirty years. Was that a life? I got a house in Bolinas above a beach where the women walk around topless, and I never go there. What's wrong with me? Why do I wake up every morning? There was a time in my life, I thought that I would never tire of seeing bare bosoms. But is that enough? What lasts, if not that? They say sex and money, those impulses will never fail. I say: "love." And what is love but illusion? So what am I saying? Illusion, that's what lasts. My fantasy, it never goes away. My money means nothing to me. My fantasy, though - without it, nada. My money buys me my fantasy. My dream is: drama. There it is. Simple. A stranger on the beach with coconuts dangling from her chest is not drama. She is a stranger forever. Spreadsheets, audits, adjusting entries - that was not drama. I want to risk my money. I want it to be at stake. I want to be along for the ride/
lol
After Andy gave his pitch, there was an awkward moment for both of them. Jimmy Porter kind of sighed, and then he just started chatting to fill up the vacuum. He said something about how half his line workers had called in sick that morning, but he knew better. It was the first day of king salmon season, and if you took a skiff out on Monterey Bay and puttered around the kelp beds, you would see a lot of guys wearing San Juan Cast & Die baseball caps to shield their eyes from the sun. He said most of his workers were lower class, who only cared about three things: fishing, hunting, and fucking. Jimmy Porter said that he got two Laotians in here once and put them on the line, and boy were they hard workers! But when it came time to shut the line down for coffee break, they wouldn't leave their stations. Two weeks like that, never left their stools. Finally, Porter got a translator to come by the plant, and it turned out the two Laotians were afraid if they left their stations, someone would take their place. Porter was so impressed that he got himself two more Laotians, and suddenly the productivity plummeted.
'What do you think it was?' he asked Andy.
Andy leaned forward. He could smell Porter's aftershave.
'Maybe two men and two women?'
That wasn't it. Porter brought the translator back, and it turned out he didn't have four Laotians after all: he had two Cambodians and two Laotians, who apparently are like oil and water, can't work together. His story finished, Porter laughed, then settled down and looked hard at Andy's specification sheet. His eyes looked up.
lmao
'What is it like to look at yourself in the mirror every day, Francis?'
'Oh, don't give me that again. It doesn't work on me. I'm not thirty years old anymore. Every successful person in this town is just as ruthless as I am. And in five more years you probably will be too. You've done a good job, a bang-up job. And now I'm giving your code a chance to live. If it weren't for me and it weren't for me bringing in Lloyd, you would suffer a far worse humiliation than what's going on here. You'd have built a superior product that got no more attention than some undergraduate's senior thesis. I'm going to take your work and make it famous, and I'm going to give it a chance, and for that you should be goddamned thankful.'
'Don't expect to get a Hallmark anytime soon.'
'Getting screwed is part of the ritual, Andy. At least I'm not going to dumb down your technology. I'm going to make it better. I promise you that. When J was screwed, I designed a Falcon chip that was saddled with sixteen-bit software that made my chip design look slow. Wall Street analysts who used to look up to me stopped doing so - from their point of view I had delivered a chip that was faster, but not exponentially faster. They didn't care it was the software holding it back. I promise you that nobody will ever think of you that way. I promise you I will serve your work with respect, and if you can't recognize the importance of that, engineer to engineer, then you're not the man I thought you were.'
'Hey, what gives? You should be excited. This is your moment to be on top of the heap.'
'It's just been a long haul It's taken a lot out of me. I thought I would be excited, but feel my pulse - it's like I just woke up. You know what I really want to do right now? I want to order a burger from room service and see if there's a game on television. Or maybe go down to the bar and flirt with the German tourists. I could take this or leave it. I can't understand it. I cheat, bully, and lie to get what I want, only to find all the pleasure's already been squeezed out.'
Lloyd and the two guys in New York began discussing how much of the Everyware shares should be reserved for employees. Lloyd seemed to think it was customary to set a big percentage aside, but the two guys in New York seemed amused by that idea.
'This isn't 1986 anymore,' one said.
The other added, 'Don't give away the farm unless you have to.'
Francis turned to Quentin Black and whispered, 'I thought most employees always got shares.'
'Top managers, sure. But the days of secretaries retiring at age thirty-five are over. Give 'em a set of steak knives at Christmas, they'll be happy.'
Francis stood up again. 'Excuse me,' he said. 'Excuse me, hold on here.' He walked forward to stand beside Lloyd. 'Maybe you all are right about what we can get away with if we want to, but J don't want to. I want shares for the employees. I want to be able to hire people, engineers out of college, and say to them, "Here's a piece of the action."
hmm interesting periodization
'But it's a realistic one. I don't want to fight the market on this one. You want to understand what we're up against? Microsoft dominates the operating-systems market for desktop computers, and they're gaining in the race to control big iron. They've become the gatekeeper, and it's nearly impossible to compete with them. Maybe the only way to break their stranglehold is to invent a new box, a box that makes the operating system irrelevant. That's what I want your technology for. I don't care what price the box sells for. That's not important. We'll sell it for whatever consumers want to pay for it. What's important is that the box, at whatever price, doesn't have to kiss Microsoft's ass. So you want vision? That's my vision. I want to stop kissing Microsoft's ass, I want to return this industry to a level playing field, I want to smash the gatekeeper. How's that for vision? Huh? What do you want, Andy? Let's talk terms, huh? What do you want?'
respectable tbh