overview
four ages
history
bodies
scientists
digerati
prophets
IBM
5 Sisters
Apple
Microsoft
other software
Open Source
dot com heroes
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dot com heroes?
This page looks at some of
the 'dot com heroes' such as Amazon.com.
Robert Reid's Architects of the Web - 1,000 Days That Built The
Future of Business (New York, Wiley 97) offers intelligent - if
on occasion indulgent - profiles of Netscape's Marc Andreessen, Java
developer Kim Polese, VRML pioneer Mark Pesce, Yahoo!
billionaire Jerry Yang and Halsey Minor of CNET among others.
Heroes.com
(London, Hodder & Stoughton 00) by Louise Proddow is an excursion
into designer coffee table territory: glossy paper, sparse and
breathless print, lots of colour photos of beautiful young e-ntrepreneurs
in artful poses. Fast forward to something more substantial. Elizabeth
Carlassare's Dot Com Divas: E-Business Insights from
the Visionary Women Founders of 20 Net Ventures (New
York, McGraw-Hill 01) is inspirational but otherwise thin.
Road
Warriors - Dreams & Nightmares Along the Information
Highway
(New York, Dutton 95) by Daniel Bursten & David Kline
provides a picture of business and technological developments
- the US debate
about high definition television, the failure of 3DO, the
Exon Bill to free the Web from digital nastiness - and interviews
with cable czar John Malone,
regulator Reed Hundt
and telco executive Ray Smith. The profiles of individual
companies and projects are looking very dated - five years
is a long time online - but the overall description is holding
up well.
the financiers
There's a more in-depth study of financing in our e-Capital
guide.
The much-hyped The
New New Thing by Michael Lewis (London, Hodder &
Stoughton 99) offers an entertaining perspective on financing
silicon valley.
Venture capitalist Ann Winblad,
of Hummer Winblad, was memorialized in issue 4.09 of Wired.
Her rival, the ubiquitous John Doerr,
another of the 'Sand Hill Road' mafiosi, featured two years
later.
Randall Stross' EBoys: The First Inside Account of Venture
Capitalists At Work (New York, 00) is better than the
title suggests, although as with his books on IBM and Microsoft
Stross is a tad overawed by the exalted company and inclined
to believe what he's told. Stross supersedes James Wilson's
The New Venturers: Inside the High-Stakes World of Venture
Capital (Reading, Addison-Wesley 85).
Ruthann Quindlen's Confessions of a Venture Capitalist:
Inside the High Stakes World of Startup Financing (New
York, Warner 00) relentlessly looks on the bright side.
We recommend that you read it in conjunction with some of
the studies highlighted in our e-Capital
guide, for example The Venture Capital Cycle (Cambridge,
MIT Press 00) by Paul Gompers & Josh Lerner.
A local view is provided by Bill Ferris' Nothing Ventured,
Nothing Gained (St Leonards, Allen & Unwin 00),
an anecdotal account by one of Australia's leading vc's.
amazon
We're due for an adulatory biography of Amazon.com's
Jeff Bezos. There was an intelligent profile
in the March 1999 Wired and one
in the May 2001 First Monday. Lenny Riggio
and Barnes & Noble featured two months later.
Amazon is described - superficially and without sparkle
- in Rebecca Saunders' Business the Amazon.Com Way:
Secrets of the World's Most Astonishing Web Business
(Oxford, Capstone 99). For us, spray-paining 'dot
com' and 'etail' onto every page is not a substitute for
analysis or hard information. We recommend instead
Robert Spector's more insightful Amazon.com: Get Big
Fast (New York, Harper 00).
other czars
Charles Schwab,
the monster online broker, Bob Metcalfe
(3Com czar), Cisco
(the router giant without whose boxes much of the Web would
dissolve) and Rob Glaser
(RealAudio king) also got Wired profiles.
Jason Olim and his brother Matthew, founders of online record
store CDNow (now an ailing outpost of the AOL Time Warner
empire) described their experiences in the relentlessly
upbeat The CDNow Story: Rags to Riches on the Internet
(Lakewood, Top Floor 98).
The Monk & the Riddle (Boston, Harvard Business
School Press 00) by Randy Komisar is a dot com Zen &
the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance; if like us you weren't
wowed by Pirsig's book we'd advise you to skip the recipe
for sensitive new age Silicon Alley millionaires.
Tom Ashbrook's The Leap: A Memoir of Love & Madness
in the Internet Gold Rush (Boston, Houghton Mifflin
00) has a bit more substance.
the fat cats in silicon alley
The inimitable Robert
X Cringely in Accidental Empires: How the Boys of
Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition
& Still Can't Get A Date (New York, Harper 93) kicked
off the NetNerd watch. A version of his Nerds
2.0 television series - an Internet history that's
better than the title suggests - is online.
He's been joined by Po
Bronson - notably in the ever-so-clever Nudist on
the Late Shift: And Other Truer Tales of Silicon Valley
(New York, Random 99) - and David Kaplan, author of the
more substantial The Silicon Boys & Their Valley
of Dreams (New York, Morrow 99).
There are brief - and of course slavishly adoring - profiles
of the new rich on the Forbes
400 site, aka the business-person's Who Weekly.
The latter's Business the AOL Way: Secrets of the World's
#1 Webmaster (Oxford, Capstone 00) is also due out soon
... and with apologies to #1, for us the Web is about diversity
and innovation, not the AOL digital ghetto.
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