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In the weird glow of the dying millennium, Michael Lewis sets
out on a safari through Silicon Valley to find the world's most important technology
entrepreneur, the true representative of the coming age. All roads lead to a man
who is about to achieve an unprecedented hat trick with the creation of his third,
separate, billion-dollar company: first Silicon Graphics, then Netscape -- which
launched the Information Age -- and now Healtheon, a startup that may turn the
$1.5 trillion health-care industry on its head. Despite
the variety of his achievements, this guy, Jim Clark, thinks of himself mainly
as the creator of Hyperion, which happens to be a sailboat … not just an ordinary
yacht, but the world's largest single-mast vessel, a machine more complex than
a 747. It is claimed that the boat can be sailed via computer from the owner's
desk in San Francisco and that the new code may contain the seeds of the next
billion-dollar coup. Whatever the next new thing after Healtheon turns out to
be, Michael Lewis is invited to be a fly on the wall aboard Hyperion as the shape
of the future is revealed. On the wings of Lewis's celebrated
storytelling, the reader takes the ride of a lifetime through this strange landscape
of geeks and billionaires. We get the inside story of the battle between Netscape
and Microsoft; we sit in the room as Healtheon management pitches the investment
bankers on the idea that Healtheon is the next Microsoft; we get queasy as the
great boat sets out into the rage of the North Atlantic in winter. Ingeniously
conceived as both a history of the Internet revolution and a narrative unfolding
at warp speed on the high-tech frontier, The New New Thing describes a
vast paradigm shift in American culture: a shift away from conventional business
models and definitions of success, and toward a new way of thinking about the
world and our control over it. The rules of American capitalism - -how money is
raised, how the spoils are divided -- have been drastically rewritten according
to a single entrepreneur's vision of the future of the Internet. And in every
anecdote and character sketch of this shrewd and brilliantly funny book, Michael
Lewis is drawing us a map of markets and free enterprise in the twenty-first century.
Michael Lewis is the author of several books, including the international
bestseller Liar's Poker. He has been the American editor of the British
weekly The Spectator and a senior editor at The New Republic. Currently
a visiting professor at the University of California-Berkeley, Lewis lives in
Berkeley with his wife, Tabitha Soren, and their newborn daughter.
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