The New New Thing Quotes

“There is nothing more satisfying to me,” he said, “than to create a complete self-contained world when a computer is controlling it.”
― Michael Lewis, The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story

“His life was dedicated to the fine art of tearing down and building anew.”
― Michael Lewis, The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story

“In something like an instant the man had changed his life. He reinvented his relationship to the world around him in a way that is considered normal only in California.”
― Michael Lewis, The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story

“Clark liked to say that human beings, when they took risks, fell into one of two types, pigs or chickens. “The difference between these two kinds of people,” he’d say, “is the difference between the pig and the chicken in the ham-and-eggs breakfast. The chicken is interested, the pig is committed. If you are going to do anything worth doing, you need a lot of pigs.” The”
― Michael Lewis, The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story

“This was only one of many recent changes along the capitalist food chain. Wall Street had gone from being the celebrities of the money culture to being its lackeys.”
― Michael Lewis, The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story

“The technologist’s tendency to commit all his resources to new technology,”
― Michael Lewis, The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story

“This gorgeous financial myopia was common in the Valley, and one of the chief sources of its success.”
― Michael Lewis, The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story

“The computer programmer creates the only path available to the computer user; the effect of his decisions on others is masked by their abstraction.”
― Michael Lewis, The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story

“With every stroke of their keyboards they hacked a path through the forest that others would be required to follow.”
― Michael Lewis, The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story

“there must be some connection between his excessively romantic attitude toward computer programming and his appeal to women.”
― Michael Lewis, The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story

“The trouble was that clarity and simplicity were more important in computer language than in human language.”
― Michael Lewis, The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story

“Lance was to computer programming what Joyce was to literature, possibly profound but also baffling.”
― Michael Lewis, The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story

“He had little patience for the mystical, spiritual approach of computer programming.”
― Michael Lewis, The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story

“In context the computer programmers appeared idle. They sat quietly, stared into their screens and sipped cappuccinos. And yet they were by far the most important people on board Hyperion.”
― Michael Lewis, The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story

“The general idea was to sell their software first to rich technophiles and then, gradually, infiltrate the minds of the middle-class owners of suburban tract houses.”
― Michael Lewis, The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story

“The American Home of the Future, it went without saying, would be controlled and monitored by a computer. The computer would permit the owner to enter into a new, fantastic relationship with his dwelling.”
― Michael Lewis, The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story

“Microsoft was twelve years old before people started talking about Microsoft millionaires; Netscape was one and a half.”
― Michael Lewis, The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story

“Success was his chosen form of revenge.”
― Michael Lewis, The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story

“a thousand people don’t build anything; if you need to build something really complicated really fast, you hire fifty of the smartest people you can find.”
― Michael Lewis, The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story

“Microsoft had made it clear that the only way to preserve your station in Valley life was to create a monopoly. If you created a monopoly, you were at least partially exempt from the ordinary rapid cycle of creation and destruction.”
― Michael Lewis, The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story

“For a technology company to succeed, he argued, it needed always to be looking to destroy itself. If it didn’t, someone else would.”
― Michael Lewis, The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story

“Moore’s law came with a social corollary: high-tech could not remain high-tech for long.”
― Michael Lewis, The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story

“He still had the Dutch habit of laughing at whatever you told him, just in case it happened to be a joke.”
― Michael Lewis, The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story

“In a digression from his otherwise rigorous analysis”
― Michael Lewis, The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story

“While Steve was gone”
― Michael Lewis, The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story

“I think they are all mad,” said Robert”
― Michael Lewis, The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story

“Certainly no one saw the Microsoft antitrust trial for what it was: yet another rock Clark had pushed off the side of a cliff”
― Michael Lewis, The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story

“Institutions loathe disorder. They seek to socialize forces of anarchy. It’s one of the many internal contradictions that have failed to collapse capitalism: wealth generation is suppressed by those who are supposedly most interested in wealth. Rapid technological change threatens people who already have power”
― Michael Lewis, The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story

“This period tested Clark’s resolve. Some part of him feared that the game was over. The truth was”
― Michael Lewis, The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story

“The true purpose of the meeting was not to determine whether Healtheon was worthy of Wall Street’s attention. It was to determine just how enthusiastic the bankers were prepared to sound about Healtheon. Their money was cheap: there was so much money pouring into the Valley that Mike Long had about twelve different ways he could get his hands on what he needed. The Valley was a little experiment of capitalism with too much capital. For a brief but shining moment capital lost its purchase on its own process. The process took on a momentum all its own”
― Michael Lewis, The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story