At least that’s the impression one gets from a back-to-back reading of Paul Andrews’s Microsoft tome, “How the Web Was Won,” and Po Bronson’s pointillist Valley guide, “The Nudist on the Late Shift.” Bronson sees Silicon Valley not just as a contemporary gold rush but a magical land where everybody from bankers to clerical workers speak the babble of bandwidth and red herrings. Bronson’s subjects come to the Valley not simply for riches and glory, but in the grip of some neoprimal urge, like eels heading to the Sargasso Sea at spawn time, or Richard Dreyfuss in “Close Encounters” drawn to the mashed-potato mountain. Bronson calls them Venture Trippers, and notes that they’re not just techies. In one vignette, some hard-core programmers emerge from a coding binge and are astounded to find that while they were pasted to their keyboards, a population of cool-hunting Beautiful People had shown up in the Valley–as if actors who barely missed the cut for " ‘Friends’," writes Bronson, “had been given a job in the Internet division.” Valley newcomers take note of a guy like Sabeer Bhatia, who in two years started Hotmail and sold it for $400 million and think why not me?
On the other hand, “How the Web Was Won” vividly describes what it’s like to work for Bill Gates. (The book is all about how the company successfully accommodated the Internet revolution. But Andrews is so tilted toward Microsoft’s contention that it won the Web solely by fair play that the book has much more value as an anthropological study.) Bill G. has a terrific knack for getting employees to buy into his creative paranoia; juiced up by specters of obsolescence, people routinely work “Microsoft hours,” rendering spouses into strangers–all for La Causa. But the Internet threat was real, and, impressively, the corporation hung loose enough to allow callow newcomers to lead the transformation of Microsoft into a Net-savvy operation.
In this well-researched account, Andrews does his best to glorify those hard-core softies–calling them heroes, gods and wild dogs–but compared with Bronson’s truly flaky denizens of the Valley, who risk all and let it all hang out in their hunt for the pot o’ IPO gold, the Redmond scene seems sort of, well, tame. Microsoft COO Bob Herbold told me last week that despite all the Valley hype, his company was still making its recruiting goals. But if I were a supersmart, supermotivated gradu-geek wanting to make my mark on the world? After reading these two books, I’d feel that by heading Northwest–even for a brilliantly run, high-option-wielding, influential operation like Microsoft–I’d be missing the real action. If Bill Gates wants something else to worry about, he should read “Nudist on the Late Shift.”
