By the time layoffs and early retirement programs ended, IBM had almost halved its workforce from 405,500 people to 225,000.5 One-fifth of those laid-off employees came back as consultants, a practice that became increasingly common in the 1990s.6 Making IBM “leaner” matched the image of the company that Louis Gerstner Jr., IBM’s chief executive, was trying to project. In August 1994 he said to employees, “We operate as an entrepreneurial organization with a minimum of bureaucracy and a never-ending focus on productivity.”7 Under Gerstner’s leadership, the image of IBM went from that of a large stable company with long-term employment to an “entrepreneurial” company. Netscape and IBM represented two different models of work in the technology sector. Not only did the two companies bitterly compete over how their customers would access the web, but at stake was which of their models for the workplace would prevail in the new economy. In many ways, 1994 marked the beginning of the new economy with both the Netscape initial public offering (IPO) and the IBM layoffs, and both show the institutional arrangements, technological developments, and rhetorical shifts that made possible the dot-com boom and created the environment for New York’s Silicon Alley. Both companies represent a spectrum of how technology in the 1990s was framed—at once sure, staid, and stable and young, rule-breaking, and edgy.