Month: March 2023

  • Bob Hoffman + more things

    Bob Hoffman

    Bob Hoffman has been pointing out the problems with the way online advertising has been run for years. Bob’s book Adscam is probably one of the best critical examinations of the online media eco-system and the risks inherent in programmatic advertising.

    Bob Hoffman got to speak with the European Parliament. Bear with it as audio improves through the recording.

    He also spoke at the Digital Marketing is Broken event.

    The main thrust of his argument about marketing effectiveness is supported by the works of Peter Field, Les Binet and Byron Sharp.

    Economics

    Interesting talk on the benefits and limitations of economic sanctions with a particular focus on Iran and Russia.

    Ireland

    I never realised that Sony had a factory in Ireland as early as 1960; Sony globalised production of transistor radios relatively early on in their production life. Compare this to the later US technology businesses setting up shop in Ireland over the next couple of decades. This also might go someway to explain why Sony was such a respected brand in Ireland and shows how visionary and experimental the Sony management were. These comments on Irish workers in 1963 versus their Japanese counterparts are interesting. The assembly workers don’t seem to realise the intrinsic value of (the Sony Japan-made) transistors that go into the products – this might be down to education as this was likely a soldering and screwing products together assembly line.

    Suzuki-san points out what he thinks are flaws with Irish workers whilst recognising that this partly down to the different social contract between employee and business. Part of the problem was that Irish workers had the opportunity of going abroad without any government restriction compared to Japan. Suzuki-san didn’t believe that Irish workers are bad workers, but rather they require more investment to encourage them to become good workers.

    Interesting perspective on the Windsor Framework from an Irish and EU perspective. Tony Connelly did one of the best podcast series on the Brexit process for RTÉ

    Materials

    I am a big fan of the Rose Anvil account for the way they take a deep dive into materials and shoe construction. Here’s a great example of their work which shows the design principle of what you leave out is as important as what you leave in a product.

    Retailing

    Olivia Moore on Temu e-commerce app. Her idea of ‘invisible AI’ is actually more prevalent than Ms Moore thinks, otherwise great conversation to listen in on.

    Connie Chan does a short talk on the future of e-commerce.

  • Armani on back to the office + more stuff

    Armani and work from home trend

    Armani, the eponymous luxury fashion label of Giorgio Armani posted advertisements in the Financial Times this week. The advertisements harked back to Armani’s looks of the 1980s and 1990s. But what I thought was most notable about the advertisements was their promotion of made-to-measure menswear.

    Armani channeling the 1980s &  1990s hoping for a return to the office from hybrid working
    Armani via the FT

    Armani is clearly putting its weight behind a return to the office. Presumably Armani think that this move back to the office will also mean a move to formal business dress. This doesn’t seem to be supported by what I have been seeing and is in a stark contrast to the current approach of rival Zegna. Armani have called a lot of past trends right. They were one of the first brands setting up a retail network in China. They were early to putting their catwalk shows on the web to gain a wider audience. Armani were clever in the way they approached licensing of their brand. During the 1990s Armani expanded into sportswear, watches, eyeglasses, cosmetics and home which looked prescient in retrospect.

    We’ll see if Armani’s views on a return to the office pan out, I am not so sure it will be.

    Business

    Maslow’s Hierarchy of Startups – by Rex Woodbury 

    Degree inflation: Why requiring college degrees for jobs that don’t need them is a mistake – Vox  – businesses signalling that there is a large amount of potential workers out there. Arbitrary way of filtering down applications. The Philippines is much worse, where working in a retail job would require a college degree of some sort

    China

    SVB’s First Failure – The Wire ChinaSVB’s Board had asked me to found a brand-new bank: the Shanghai Pudong Development Silicon Valley Bank (SPD SVB), a joint venture between SVB and the state-owned Shanghai Pudong Development Bank. The board had committed $100 million to establishing SVB’s operations in China, and I was filled with goodwill and optimism about the endeavor.  Although I thoroughly enjoyed my time in China and the many friends I met there, from today’s vantage point, I firmly believe we were (and are still) being played.

    For female journalists, covering China comes at a cost — Radio Free AsiaThe sheer volume of vitriol targeting reporters given China’s size and the nationalistic fervor of many of its citizens can set the abuse apart. Compounding their anxiety is a fear that the intimidation is sanctioned, if not coordinated, by the Chinese Communist Party itself.  “When, for example, an American female journalist gets trolled, it’s probably coming from right-wing crazies or some fringe corner of society,” said Vicky Xu, a journalist in Australia, whose reporting on abuses against Uyghurs in Xinjiang brought a flood of death threats. “The kind of role and voice they have is very, very limited.

    Opinion | Xi’s visit to Putin should worry the West – The Washington PostIf you were looking for another reason why it’s important that Ukraine succeeds against Russia, consider the photos from Moscow. “The President of Eurasia” — I fear that’s the invisible caption of the pictures of Xi that we’re seeing amid the Kremlin’s golden doors and red carpets. The idea that a vast swath of the world is dominated by a China that stands so resolutely against freedom and democracy is chilling. If this alliance succeeds, we will live in a darker world

    Culture

    A Documentary About the Hasidic Jews of Brooklyn 

    Design

    A Campaign to Remind Us That We Love New York (City) – The New York TimesThe people who came up with We ♥ NYC say it is a mark for a different time. But they see parallels to the troubled era that gave rise to I ♥ NY. “We’re hopefully going to be able to cut through divisiveness and negativity” that accompanied the pandemic, said Kathryn Wylde, the president and chief executive of the Partnership for New York City, a consortium of corporations and business executives that is leading the We ♥ NYC campaign. She said that besides rejuvenating people’s spirits, “we want to remind them they can make a difference, whether it’s on the block or in the city as a whole.” She added: “We want to remind them we don’t have to maintain these divisions that have grown up between business and labor and rich and poor.” She cited surveys her group had conducted during the pandemic. “The results we’ve gotten back are people in New York want to be part of fixing what they see as broken in the city,” – Interesting choices in this. Curious to know why they didn’t rally around the previous campaign? It was atemporal in design and a personal commitment, the NY aspect of it implying inclusion? The new one has a lot of challenges: it lacks visual symmetry & balance. Ironically the original works better in digital contexts (for instance as an app logo) than the new version. The emoji heart will date very fast. The font choice I don’t understand. And what about the exclusive nature of NYC rather than the inclusive aspect of NY – even a DE&I fail. ‘Tunnel people’ are a key part of NYC too.

    FMCG

    Nestlé says less than half of its mainstream food and drinks are considered ‘healthy’ | Financial Times 

    IPSOS noted that global inflation likely peaked in 2022 (according to IMF), and negotiations are happening at the moment between retailers and FMCG companies. Consumers will still grapple with high prices for a good while yet. Ipsos posit that the inflation creates opportunities for growing market share via innovation, with a view to eventual revenue growth.

    Gen Z: How beauty, food and drink brands can support their unique needs | Mintel – new generation, same as the old generation. These are longitudinal trends rather than ‘gen Z’ specific

    Germany

    The commentary about collusion between Huawei and Deutsche Telekom is particularly illuminating: Germany could ban China’s Huawei, ZTE from parts of 5G networks -source | Reuters 

    Health

    Will Ozempic Change How We Think About Being Fat and Being Thin? | The New Yorker 

    Are We Going Into An #Ozempic Epidemic? | Hypebae – interesting that this is being covered by their beauty team

    Cognito’s Experimental Headset to Treat Alzheimer’s Disease | Business Insider 

    Hong Kong

    Hong Kong theft cases spike 40 per cent in first 2 months of year, but ‘no close link’ to border reopening with mainland China, police say | South China Morning Post – hmmm

    Hong Kong’s state-sponsored national anthem SEO is working • The Register 

    Ideas

    Innovation Culture & Business Portfolio Assessment Program | Strategyzer 

    How Chinese Companies Are Reinventing ManagementIf a team splits up and some members form a new team, the leader of the new team must pay a fee to the original team for its previous training of the acquired staff. Moreover, the company’s financial system automatically transfers 10% of an acquired staffer’s bonus to the original team leader every month for one year. This system encourages each team to reorganize and generate new autonomous teams

    Indonesia

    The rise of performance politics in Indonesia? – New Mandala 

    Japan

    Japan’s biggest defence fair raises questions about military expansion | Financial Times 

    Korea

    Kakao Mobility picks up ‘super app’ startup Splyt, once backed by SoftBank and Grab | TechCrunch 

    Luxury

    Here’s How Big and Profitable Watch Collections Are Around the Globe – Robb Report 

    Marketing

    Need to trim advertising spend? Kantar research suggests what you can’t afford to cut – ThinkTV 

    Materials

    Europe Balks at Strategic Stockpile for Critical Green Metals – Bloomberg 

    Idaho and Montana Rest Atop Incredible Mineral Riches 

    Media

    This makes sense, particularly after Bytedance tried to use the app to track journalists: BBC advises staff to delete TikTok from work phones – BBC News 

    Online

    Google opens early access to Bard, its AI chatbot | TechCrunch 

    Yes, of course we should ban TikTok – by Noah Smith 

    TikTok Showdown Reaches Fever Pitch: CEO’s Congressional Testimony | National Review 

    Quality

    HDD Average Life Span Misses 3-Year Mark In Study of 2,007 Defective Drives – Slashdot 

    Retailing

    WPP acquires data-driven influencer marketing agency Goat | WPP – from memory Goat were about affiliate marketing via social media for brands

    Security

    CIA’s CTO and deputy director explain the future of high-tech spying | Fast Company 

    Ferrari Has Been Hit by a Cyberattack That Exposed Customer Data – Robb Report 

    Singapore

    Singapore and Hong Kong vie to be the Caymans of Asia | Financial Times 

    Software

    OpenAI Research Says 80% of U.S. Workers’ Jobs Will Be Impacted by GPT – its already there to a certain extent with the likes of Grammarly and Nuance Communications

    Amazon Faces Moment of Truth on Alexa as ChatGPT Steals Its Thunder — The InformationToyota doesn’t seem to need Alexa anymore. The automaker has dropped support for an app that allowed users to operate Alexa in their cars via smartphones in 2023 editions of several of its most popular models, including the RAV4, Prius and Corolla. And according to a person close to the automaker, Toyota plans to phase out Alexa integration from the rest of its lineup in the coming years. The automaker is now focused on improving an in-house voice assistant it launched last year and is considering integrating ChatGPT, the chatbot created by OpenAI, into it

    Style

    The influence of cyberpunk on tech wear and functional fashion. William Gibson’s Zero History talks explicitly about the function and tech wear nature of military clothing. They are a central part of the plot line.

    Technology

    Amazon Faces Moment of Truth on Alexa as ChatGPT Steals Its Thunder — The InformationToyota doesn’t seem to need Alexa anymore. The automaker has dropped support for an app that allowed users to operate Alexa in their cars via smartphones in 2023 editions of several of its most popular models, including the RAV4, Prius and Corolla. And according to a person close to the automaker, Toyota plans to phase out Alexa integration from the rest of its lineup in the coming years. The automaker is now focused on improving an in-house voice assistant it launched last year and is considering integrating ChatGPT, the chatbot created by OpenAI, into it

    Taiwan

    I am currently reading Chris Miller’s book Chip War. This is a great talk by Chris about many of the areas covered in the book

    Wireless

    Satellite operator enables 3GPP device interoperability | EE Times 

  • Gordon Moore + more things

    Gordon Moore

    I was introduced to Gordon Moore and Moore’s Law through a college class on innovation taught by my friend Neil Keegan. I have also just read Michael Malone’s The Big Score; an account written in the early 1980s that Gordon Moore featured in as one of the co-founders of Intel.

    OnInnovation Interview: Gordon Moore
    Gordon Moore taken for an OnInnovation interview he was doing circa 2008 for the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation

    Gordon Moore was a San Franciscan by birth but educated at John Hopkins University, rather than Stanford University. He worked at Shockley and at Fairchild Semiconductor prior to co-founding Intel. In many respects Gordon Moore was more low-key than other Intel founders like Bob Noyce or Andy Grove – but the ideas behind Moore’s Law echoed around the world. The law has been interpreted and misinterpreted by technologists, economists, journalists and policy makers the world over.

    Moore’s Law

    Gordon Moore made an observation that was published in 1965 and became an immutable forecast for the rest of the 20th century that would guide the direction of the semiconductor industry and every industry that relied upon it.

    It started off with an article that Gordon Moore had published in Electronics magazine on April 19, 1965. He observed that the number of transistors were doubling every year over a 10-year period. This relationship was widely known by people working in the field. But the semiconductor field was a small community and the name Moore’s Law eventually stuck.

    The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year. Certainly over the short term this rate can be expected to continue, if not to increase. Over the longer term, the rate of increase is a bit more uncertain, although there is no reason to believe it will not remain nearly constant for at least 10 years.

    Once, that had been proven correct in 1975, Gordon Moore went on to revise his model to assume a similar effect very two years. This was presented in a speech at the IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting that year.

    All of this meant that technologists like those at the Computer Science Lab at Xerox PARC could spend large amounts of money building foundational technologies and know that the ability to commercially produce these items would catch up ten years hence. Robert X. Cringely posits that much of the dot com bust was down to an industry getting too ahead of itself in terms of what it estimated Moore’s Law could achieve in the mid-to-late 1990s.

    Integrated circuits started finding their way into everyday products and facilitating new product categories such as laptops, smartphones and the modern web.

    Gordon Moore left us on March 24, 2023.

    Beauty

    How millennial faces fell out of fashion | Financial Times 

    China

    The world according to Xi | The Economist 

    China detains staff, raids office of US due diligence firm Mintz Group | Reuters“Red alerts should be going off in all boardrooms right now about risks in China,” the source, who did not wish to be identified due to the sensitive nature of the matter, said. China has said it welcomes foreign trade and investment but stressed that security comes before development. U.S. businesses operating in China are increasingly pessimistic about their prospects in the world’s second-largest economy, according to a survey released this month by the American Chamber of Commerce in China. Two-thirds of the respondents cited rising U.S.-China tensions as the top business challenge. Western due diligence companies have got into trouble with Chinese authorities before. British corporate investigator Peter Humphrey and his American wife Yu Yingzeng, who ran risk consultancy ChinaWhys, were detained in 2013 following work they did for British pharmaceuticals group GSK. Humphrey, who spent two years in jail for allegedly acquiring personal information by illegal means, which he denied, told Reuters that providing due diligence in China was even harder now because of a “massive tightening in access to information.” – Ok a bit of context. If Gordon Moore hadn’t died this post would have been Mintz Group + more things – this is how big this is. The Mintz Group is a respected due diligence research company. If you are looking to:

    • Buy a business and want to know if its real, or what the states of the assets are
    • Want to ensure that you are not doing business with legally sanctioned entities
    • If you are a finance firm and want to ensure that the people you are considering to invest in are who they say they are and the business actually exists and works in the way they claim
    • If you are trying to find out if your supplier is conducting themselves in an honest manner with you

    The more opaque China becomes, the less tenable it becomes to conduct work there, do business with Chinese companies or invest in Chinese companies and the Chinese economy. The timing is less likely to be intentionally symbolic than happenstance, but either way it isn’t good news.

    Energy

    Solar power: Europe attempts to get out of China’s shadow | Financial Times 

    Finance

    Marking US banks to Market | FT – interesting and a bit concerning

    Luxury

    How the effect of COVID-19 continues to ripple through markets: Fewer Engagements Bite Into Signet Jewelry Sales 03/20/2023 

    Marketing

    Inside Food: a new agency for a complex world | Creative Review co-founded by my friend Iain Tait

    Media

    Negativity drives online news consumption | Nature Human Behaviour – and that poses a problem for its advertising based funding model looking for brand safety as well as the move to ‘barbell’ political discourse

    Online

    Lessig for the Internet Archive. This is the transcript from a video I… | by Lessig | Mar, 2023 | Medium – Internet Archive under attack by commercial media

    TikTok’s CEO Isn’t The Boss – by Alex Kantrowitz – this pretty much sums up the outcomes from the Congress star chamber. While I feel sorry for the gentleman, he knew precious little about his business. More here: TikTok Hearing: The End of an Era. This Kevin Xu helps you understand a small part of the bigger picture here: RESTRICT China – by Kevin Xu – Interconnected

    Tax Heaven 3000 – a dating sim that does your taxes by MSCHF

    Software

    ChatGPT Gets Its “Wolfram Superpowers”!—Stephen Wolfram Writings 

    ongoing by Tim Bray · The LLM Problem – excellent essay by Tim Bray on large language model systems (ChatGPT, Bard etc). Tim knows what he is talking about having helped found OpenText and going on to hold senior roles at Sun Microsystems, Google and Amazon. Bill Gates as more techno-utopian take on machine learning (of which LLM is a subset) – The Age of AI has begun | Bill Gates 

    Apple ‘Porn’ Filter | Techrights – a disturbing development that opens a Pandora’s box of possible censorship and authoritarian measures in the wrong hands – which its likely to fall given the global ubquity of Apple’s technology

  • Vietnam requiem + more things

    Vietnam Requiem

    Horns that seemed to portent the apocalypse and stuttering dialogue: ‘none of them received a heroes welcome, none of them, none of them. None of them received a heroes welcome’. This was the soundtrack of 1985 as part of Vietnam Requiem sampling 19 by Paul Hardcastle. At the time the sampling got me interested in music, production, technology and DJ’ing – which pretty much set the path for the various stages of my career to date.

    The best part of four decades later and I finally got the see documentary that was responsible for much of the samples in 19. I can understand how Vietnam Requiem might have profoundly affected Paul Hardcastle at the time.

    https://youtu.be/t2q-_Z0xdDs

    SVB (again)

    Scott Galloway on Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse and the rise of Saudi Arabia. More on SVB here.

    BMW M1

    I am a huge fan of the BMW M1 and have written about it before. So I wanted to share this documentary by Jason Cammisa on the car. The putdown of modern BMW’s current 2-series range as ‘Grand Corollas’ is actually an insult to Toyota.

    Driving Japan

    Before I moved to London, I had a car and drove everywhere. I even drove for leisure. One of my favourite drives was going past the local oil refinery and associated chemical works late at night for the dystopian cyberpunk vibes of mercury vapour lamps reflected from matt zinc coated lagging.

    These videos of driving in Japan gave me a similar sense of enjoyment.

    Au campaign

    KDDI cellphone service brand Au are looking at metaverse and Web 3.0 value added services, which partly explains this new campaign. I think that it is interesting as it reminded me of CD-ROM era motion comic and how Midjourney and Stable Diffusion can be used to reduce production costs on a campaign.

    If this all feels a bit 2021, its because large corporate take time to catch up with where things are. I can also understand the attractiveness of the metaverse and digital assets as a concept in modern Japanese culture. Even if it is out far, far ahead of where technology is actually going.

  • The Big Score by Michael Malone

    The author of The Big Score is a lifetime inhabitant of Silicon Valley, Michael Malone. Malone went to school with Steve Jobs and spent his entire working life as a journalist covering technology companies of the area. His own career sounds like a veritable history of technology sector business reporting. Malone had written and or edited for the San Jose Mercury News, Fast Company, Upside, Forbes (ASAP), The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Wired magazine. Now he co-hosts a weekly podcast on the goings on in Silicon Valley.

    The book was originally published in 1985 and has been finished prior to the launch of the Apple Macintosh. At the the time of writing, Malone had been an early to mid-career journalist.

    Silicon Valley time capsule

    His book is time capsule of how Silicon Valley would have likely seen itself. The people portrayed in it lack the kind of artifice that pioneering PR people like Pam Edstrom would later drum into a young Bill Gates with media interview training and briefing books. Companies have since gone a step further and seldom engage with the media at all; instead putting out news by blog post or staged video production a la Apple under Steve Jobs and Tim Cook.

    Steve Jobs on Apple’s future back in 1997

    When we come to understand modern-day Silicon Valley five decades into the future, we won’t have the same level of intellectual honesty that we have in The Big Score because the artefacts and interviews will be so vanilla.

    The book had become a largely forgotten business history book. Michael Malone revisited much of the history of covered in the book with a slightly longer term perspective in his 2002 work The Valley of Hearts Delight, which covered the history of the area from the 1960s to the dot com era. While The Big Score might have been forgotten, it was resurrected when Stripe through its publishing arm put it out again in 2021. They did this because while the book was forgotten by the general public, it has been read in libraries by university students and in their own collections by people like me who followed the technology sector.

    IMG_0008

    Getting things wrong

    In the introduction to the book, late career Malone freely admits the three things that he got wrong in The Big Score:

    • The impact of the internet. While it didn’t reach public consciousness until I was in college; as a high schooler in 1969 Michael Malone had got a chance to try the ARPAnet during a class visit to Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center). Secondly, the San Jose Mercury News had been using email and bulletin boards as part of their business process and offering since the 1980s. Yet Malone’s past familiarity gave him little idea of what was likely to lie ahead. His elevated access as a journalist to the great and the good of the technology sector didn’t help either; in fact Bill Gates made a similar error to Malone in the first edition of his book The Road Ahead. Gates worked very quickly with the publishers to get out a second edition that corrected his mistake. But I think Malone’s inability to see and his intellectual honesty about that is instructive for all of us
    • While he had the chance to meet Doug Engelbart, Malone wrongly assumed that Engelbart was an eccentric inventor trying to get people to pay him his dues for technology that got bypassed. So, Engelbart doesn’t feature in The Big Score at all, despite The Mother of All Demos
    • Intel’s Andy Grove, who Malone now considers to be the most important business man in the history of Silicon Valley doesn’t get a prominent role in the book. That’s not so bad as Andy Grove managed to write a lot in his own right, notably Only The Paranoid Survive

    The Big Score on excess, greed and ethics

    Malone’s The Big Score like Robert X Cringely’s later work Accidental Empires wastes no time in showing Silicon Valley’s underbelly. At the time of writing there was a large amount of industrial espionage happening between hardware companies, many start-ups were being developed by greedy experienced executives and top performing workers were burning out by trying to keep up self medicating with drugs and stimulants and alcohol to take the edge off. Something you still see today with engineers using Adderall to help them focus.

    In this respect The Big Score is very different from other works that cover this era such as Chip War, Fire In The Valley and Where Wizards Stay Up Late.

    The Big Score by Michael Malone tells the tale of Silicon Valley before the Apple Macintosh and the large media companies of Yahoo!, Excite, Alphabet or Meta et al.

    While the counterculture did play a substantial role in the PC revolution, much of early Silicon Valley was about trying to accumulate wealth and while the successful are lionised for a while; most people did middling to ok at best. There was a work culture of hard working and hard drinking which meant that marriages didn’t last. The first barrier that Silicon Valley broke through was one of class, if you were bright and successful enough, class didn’t matter.

    Robert X. Cringely in his later book Accidental Empires talked about how Bob Noyce (a key player at Shockley Labs, Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel) was rejected from joining a local country club despite his business success. Class still existed, but not within these companies to the same extent. Michael Malone in The Big Score conveys how the culture clash over class between its workers and those who funded it, ripped apart Silicon Valley and created an explosion of semiconductor companies that dominated from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s and beyond.

    While Silicon Valley provided a greater egalitarian opportunity for the corporate man who worked there, women are seldom mentioned.

    (Aside: At the start of my career in agency life I had LSI Logic as a client. LSI Logic was founded by Wilf Corrigan a veteran of Fairchild Semiconductor. Even then at the height of the dot com bubble; ‘real men’ were engineers or salesmen and women worked as secretaries or in public relations. As the company had grown their female corporate marketing manager had been pushed out of the headquarters and to the far flung European office, which was the smallest part of the business were she could do the least damage. I still remember how awkward it was to see her treated with distain by her main colleagues. She had many faults, but the treatment lacked decorum and discretion. This kind of culture is fostered from the top of an organisation down. Despite all this she had still been granted shares in the business and a good deal of share options meaning she could be comfortably well off and fund various American christian endeavours.

    I even got to meet Corrigan, the son of a Liverpool docker came across as a Silicon Valley analogue of Michael Gambon’s character in The Layer Cake – rich but not sophisticated. Someone who mistook his mix of hard work and good fortune as a divine right.)

    While much is said about the egalitarian nature of David Packard, William Hewlett and Bob Noyce, they still had the social conservatism of Leave It To Beaver. Malone eulogised Hewlett and Packard in his later award winning business history Bill and Dave. The Big Score portrays them with a clearer eye. But Bill and Dave came out later on when Silicon Valley was starting to lose its moral compass. H-P under Carly Fiorina had ruptured the H-P way and was an indicator of what was to come – so Malone recast them as mythical heroes.

    Silicon Valley soap opera

    Malone’s description in The Big Score of the break away of talent from Shockley Labs and Fairchild Semiconductor is accurate. But the story itself is engaging in the same way that the family drama of the soap operas that my Mam used to follow.

    Stripe Press

    Stripe Press have given The Big Score a much needed needed design refresh. They typography makes it easy to read and the book is immensely well read. The hardback cover, binding and paper are high quality for a book of this nature. It is the kind of book that will be an heirloom that can be handed on down to the next generation. If not for the value, for the historical knowledge. Beyond the self penned introduction at the front, the contents of the book itself were left alone.

    Recommendation?

    If you are student of Silicon Valley history or have read Malone’s other books The Big Score is a great complementary read. The republishing of the book by Stripe Press is timely given the fads of the metaverse and NFTs that have swept through the technology sector recently.

    However if you wanted one book to start you off on your Silicon Valley journey, I wouldn’t recommend it. I would suggest that you read the following books before getting to The Big Score. Its not because these books are better, but that they provide a better initial entry point into the world of Silicon Valley and its history. Malone’s book was written relatively early one and other books can provide a better basic knowledge framework because of The Big Score‘s age:

    • Accidental Empires by Robert X Cringely was something so different to what I’d been used to. I’d worked in industry, but hadn’t experienced anything like this. There are similarly great books to read like Fire In The Valley and Where Wizards Stay Up Late – but they aren’t as entertaining to read as Accidental Empires and pull their punches in order to be seen as ‘serious’ business books
    • Architects Of The Web by Robert H. Reid. He wrote up the profiles of many of the pioneer web companies including Netscape, Real Networks, Marimba, Yahoo! and Silicon Graphics. It’s helpful to revisit the future the way it was envisaged during the late 1990s and see how the future has changed. 
    • Bill and Dave by Michael Malone tells the story of Silicon Valley pioneers Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard. Nowadays people think of them as just a brand of laptops or printers. But Hewlett Packard was much more. They pioneered the Silicon Valley start-up, their successor businesses Agilient, HPE and HP. Bill and Dave’s biggest impact was in Silicon Valley culture and lore. They built the company in a garage and started the egalitarian culture with The HP Way.
    • Chip War by Chris Miller. Miller is a think tank wonk and history professor who tells the story of the semiconductor industry specifically through its relationship with the military industrial complex and its relationship with national security. Chip War deservedly was recommended as one of the FT’s business book’s of the year 2022.
    • Dogfight by Fred Vogelstein. Fred Vogelstein is an experienced journalist who most notably covered the technology sector for Wired magazine. If your familiarity with the tech industry starts with Google and Apple. Dogfight is a great entry point.
    • The New, New Thing by Michael Lewis. Pretty much every book that Lewis writes will compare unfavourably to his first book Liar’s Poker, but that book doesn’t mean that The New, New Thing shouldn’t be read. The book profiles Jim Clark, who founded Netscape and Silicon Graphics and aimed at the time to turn the healthcare industry with a new project. Lewis is capturing Clark when he is past his prime from a creative point of view. What Lewis does capture is the optimism and hubris in Silicon Valley that it can change anything.
    • What The Dormouse Said by John Markoff. John Markoff is one of the titans of reporting on the business of technology alongside Steve Lohr and Walt Mossberg. In this book Markoff draws a line between the counterculture of the 1960s and the personal computing revolution through to Web 2.0

    More on The Big Score here.