Welcome! I guess the first question that you have is why oprah time? Well in my last year of college I used to sit in the house that I shared with my landlord and write my essays whilst watching cable TV.
There I would be sipping tea, writing away and referencing from text books spread around me on the couch and coffee table. One of the programmes on the in the background was Oprah Winfrey. A lot of the show was just background noise. But I was fascinated by Oprah’s book club.
She’d give her take on a book, maybe interview the author. And then it would be blasted up the New York Times bestsellers list. This list appears weekly in the New York Times Book Review. Oprah’s book club was later emulated by other talk show hosts, notably the UK’s Richard Madeley and Judy Finegan.
On the high end you had Melvyn Bragg‘s South Bank Show when they profiled an author of the moment.
When I came to writing my own review of books that I’d read, I was was brought back to that time working on a sofa. Apple laptop in hand. It made sense to go with Oprah time.
You might also notice a link called bookshelf. This is a list of non-fiction books that I have kept. And the reasons why I have kept them.
If you’ve gone through my reviews and think that you’d like to send me a book to review. Feel free to contact me. Click this link, prove that you’re human and you will have my email address.
I had this copy of Deluxe on my shelf for a while and finally managed got round to reading it. Deluxe – how luxury lost its lustre was written by Dana Thomas. Dana knows the subject that she’s talking about.
Dana Thomas
Dana Thomas is a Paris-based journalist who covered the fashion industry. Thomas started her journalistic career writing for the ‘style’ section of The Washington Post. For a decade and a half Thomas was a cultural and fashion correspondent for Newsweek in Paris. She has contributed to The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and Architectural Digest. Deluxe is one of three books that she has written, the other is Fashionopolis, which focuses on the fast fashion industry and Gods and Kings covered the career of fashion designers Alexander McQueen and John Galliano.
Deluxe – How Luxury Lost its Lustre
In the introduction starts with a scatter gun approach. She bemoans Gucci and Burberry factory seconds on sale in China, revealing the global supply chain used by luxury brands now. She also criticises that luxury goods are used as currency by some sex workers from compensated dating to ‘returning gifts’ and pocketing the difference minus a restocking fee.
I get the sense that Thomas would like to see these companies remain small ‘secrets’ only known by a cosmopolitan cognoscenti, obviously including herself. What my younger peers would call ‘gatekeeping’ in a derogatory way.
Parasite singles
Most of Thomas’ ire focuses on Louis Vuitton early on. She describes Bernard Arnaud in unflattering terms and makes the globalisation of the brand sound like a mix of a happy accident and opportunity. Along the way she critiques the weakness of Japanese society’s love for luxury goods down to subtle social signalling and ‘parasite singles’ – young women living at home with their parents who spend their disposable income on luxury goods.
(The reality is that could be young people with a job in Spain or Italy either as east Asians and Southern Europeans tend to only move out of home to marry or to follow work or education.)
Japanese tourists took their luxury shopping abroad, taking advantage of duty-free shopping. It’s no coincidence that LVMH owns DFS (Duty Free Shopping) outlets across America and the Pacific rim. Some of the lessons that DFS and LVMH learned selling to Japanese luxury buyers, such last late closing, you can still see in showrooms across the Asia Pacific region.
Jumping from Japanese duty free shoppers in Hawaii, Thomas moves on to the connection between a generation of Italian designers and Hollywood. Richard Gere’s star power was as much down to his styling making him look the part by Giorgio Armani as it was to his considerable acting prowess.
From Hollywood, the book delves into the perfume operations of the design houses. It highlights how perfume formulation moved from being an in-house activity for design houses to being outsourced to a few specialists companies who work with a ‘creative brief’.
Quality issues
The area where I can agree most with Thomas is around the decline in quality of luxury goods. Deluxe approaches this from the different tactics that luxury companies have used to conceal their use of Chinese factories. However as Apple has shown, made in China doesn’t necessarily mean cheap or poorly made. Indeed, a decade and a half after Deluxe was written, we’re seeing local luxury brands displacing international luxury brands in the Chinese market for several reasons, usually explained using the term ‘guo chao‘.
Thomas estimates that there at least four factories in China who manufacture most of the luxury industry’s handbags and leather goods – alongside private label brands for department stores and supermarkets. I was surprised that even back in 2004, manufacturing in China only saved 30 percent of the bill of materials.
The book goes on to cover the cost cutting that has gone into luxury products, from clothes with cheap stitching, skipped tailoring such as no lining in jackets and dresses. Thomas highlights that these changes happened to allow luxury to go mass market. Luxury then followed customers out of the office or the salon into all aspects of their life including sportswear and ‘streetwear’. What my friend Jeremy calls the ‘Supremification’ of luxury.
The reliance on the mass market bought about two challenges in Thomas’ eyes:
Counterfeit products that are almost indistinguishable from the real thing by experts
Rockier finances for the large luxury corporates who are no longer sheltered from economic cycles by the continued spending of ultra high net worth individuals.
The future
Thomas left us with two parts to what we saw the future of luxury looking like:
The continued pursuit of emerging markets with India replacing China due to demographics.
The new luxury of industry specialists spinning off and creating new houses, because they were jaded with the existing business practices and structures. The book highlights Tom Ford; who recently gave up his label and sold it on in November 2022 to cosmetics business Estée Lauder and fellow fashion house Ermenegildo Zegna.
In summary
Dana Thomas’ Deluxe is a book of its time in the early to mid 2000s. Thomas clearly has some bias’ due to history with some of the protagonists, which is worthwhile bearing in mind. The historical part of the book is useful; but the luxury industry has moved on and in some ways the problems are now much worse. With those provisos in mind, I can recommend the book as a background read on the luxury sector.
The Code – Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America by Margaret O’Mara is the second book I have read recently about Silicon Valley, this review follows my review of Chip War by Chris Miller. The Code covers the history of Silicon Valley from the post-war to the present.
Margaret O’Mara
In terms of her background, O’Mara is a Clinton administration era policy wonk. When O’Mara left policy circles, she became an academic and is now a history professor at the University of Washington in Seattle – at the other end of the country. Her area of focus is on the history of the modern technology industry. She spent five years researching the book in the mid-2010s, just as Silicon Valley was going under a technological and social change.
The lens shaping everything else that I have written here
I am a sucker for books on the history of technology and like Chip War, The Code was right in my wheelhouse. It complemented, rather than overlapped some of my existing favourite technology history books like Bob Cringely’s Accidental Empires, John Markoff’s What The Dormouse Said or most of Michael Malone and Steven Levy’s output to date.
Like Miller’s Chip War, O’Mara brought a degree of distance from her material to her writing. She has done a lot of research and surfaced lesser known characters like community computing pioneer Liza Loop in her work, she doesn’t have the inside track.
Bob Cringely with his work on InfoWorld‘s Notes From the Field column got an inside track from the Valley’s engineers before he went on to write is magnus opus Accidental Empires. Like Cringely, Michael Malone was brought up in the Silicon Valley area and then worked the business section beat as a reporter for the local newspapers. Cringely and Malone lived and breathed the valley. If you are are fan of Cringely and Malone’s works, expect something that is interesting but stylistically very different.
On to The Code itself
Other reviewers have used words like ‘masterful’ and ‘majestic history’ to describe the book – which while being a reasonable guide to overall quality aren’t really all that helpful. In contrast to Chip War which took me six months, I managed to storm through The Code in a week. This is partly down my familiarity to the material covered and the airplane view that O’Mara takes when writing about her subject. I enjoyed O’Mara’s writing, but could also see someone coming to it with a good grasp of American political history and current affairs, but no knowledge of Silicon Valley history enjoying it just as much.
Being an academic O’Mara worked hard to source everything in The Code, she also provides a recommended reading list that goes into different aspects of the story that she laid out in more depth including John Markoff’s What the Dormouse Said and Theodore Roszak’s From Satori to Silicon Valley.
H-P’s first product taken by Robert Scoble
The book starts in the post-war period as Stanford and Silicon Valley peaked as an area for military contractors. O’Mara references the political lives of the H-P founders alongside the growth of cold war technologies and the space race.
O’Mara leans hard into Stanford’s defence industry connections that started pre world war II. The book then veers to the decline of the military industrial complex in the area due to a number of factors. The Vietnam war demolished the defence budget. The space programme started to wind down after NASA met Kennedy’s challenge to put man on the moon. Johnson’s social programmes took spend away from scientific developments. Finally the social climate in the US changed.
The next stage of computing was shaped by counter cultural values which O’Mara covered the libertarian instincts of Silicon Valley pioneers alongside the more community orientated views of the counterculture folks. Unlike other writers, O’Mara also covers the Boston area technology corridor that Silicon Valley eventually overshadows.
O’Mara focuses more on the finance of Silicon Valley covering some of the highlights featured in Sebastian Mallaby’s The Power Law. But O’Mara also delves into the public markets and the role of lobbying in the Silicon Valley finance machine.
O’Mara tells how immigration affected the nature of Silicon Valley through the story of Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo!. As is the case with policy wonks she puts a lot of emphasis on Al Gore, the information superhighway and the Clipper chip. The Clipper chip resurrected like Godzilla the libertarian Republican party arm of Silicon Valley elites and paved the way for the likes of Peter Thiel later on.
The Code finishes on the future hopes for autonomous driving by university research teams and Google’s Waymo business.
You can get hold of Chip War here. More book reviews here.
It has taken me far too long to finish Chip War and write this review, so apologies in advance. Chip War was one of the FT’s best business books of 2022. In reality it’s a book about history, that happens to feature businesses.
The lens shaping everything else that I have written here
I am a sucker for books on the history of technology and Chip War was right in my wheelhouse. It complemented, rather than overlapped some of my existing favourite technology history books like Bob Cringely’s Accidental Empires, John Markoff’s What The Dormouse Said or most of Michael Malone and Steven Levy’s output to date.
The author
The author Chris Miller wasn’t a familiar name to me. Unlike Cringely, Markoff, Malone or Levy; Miller is an academic rather than a former journalist. Miller currently teaches international history at Tufts University. Chip War wasn’t his first book, his previous ones have focused on Soviet and Russian history. As a technology sector outsider, Miller’s Chip War has a very different tone my other favourite books from the genre.
It also allowed Miller to view the history of semiconductors in terms of a global perspective, that I hadn’t previously seen done.
On to Chip War itself
Other reviewers have used words like ‘outstanding’ and ‘epic’ to describe the book – which while being a reasonable guide to overall quality and length of read aren’t really all that helpful. It took me six months to read as a casual book. This is partly down to a hectic work schedule and that its a long book. I suspect that some readers when they reviewed the book seem to have thought ‘long’ as difficult to read. It’s actually 351 pages ignoring acknowledgements and the footnotes at the back of the book. Being an academic Miller worked hard to source everything in Chip War.
The book starts in the post-war period as the defence industry moves from being focused on hammering steel to developing smarter systems using semiconductors. That road takes the book past Texas Instruments and the early Silicon Valley of Bob Noyce and other members of the treacherous eight.
The book also zooms out to cover the Soviet Union’s failed efforts to replicate Silicon Valley as well as domestic industrial espionage and the start of globalisation which begat the current industry.
The Japanese challenge is covered in depth as is the rise of Korea including challenges that the industry faced in the early 2000s. The rise of Taiwan and its use of semiconductors as a hedge against invasion from the mainland. European tool maker ASML gets its own section, which is a case study in how to make a virtue of necessity. Finally it covers the technology conflict with China. Bring this up to date circa 2022.
If you are student of Silicon Valley history, then Chip War is unique in the way it puts everything in context. There were some completely new parts to me such as the political role that Sony founder Akio Morita played in advocating for a robust Japanese semiconductor industry as part of reasserting Japanese importance internationally.
You can get hold of Chip War here. More book reviews here.
I spent part of the bank holiday weekend reading and finally managed to tuck into designer Bruce Mau’s signature book MC24. For those that haven’t heard of him Bruce Mau is a Canadian designer and academic. He founded a brand design agency: Bruce Mau Design which is now part of marketing combine Stagwell. His Massive Change Network (MCN) is in the transformation business similar to Stewart Brand’s Global Business Network (acquired by the Monitor Group now called Monitor Deloitte) and The Long Now Foundation. The philosophy of Bruce Mau and feels like it had been lifted from an amalgam of TED Talks. Bruce Mau believes in a sustainable future with techno-optimist bent to his views.
Bruce Mau, like Robert Greene has principles that seem to contradict each other. Publisher Phaidon have wrapped the hard back cover of the book in an iridescent satin fabric that a photograph doesn’t do justice to. Regardless of whether you think the book is a self-help bible, your creative muse, an objet d’art or something nice to thumb through on a Sunday afternoon Bruce Mau and his book MC24 are ideal.
China
Where China is beating the world – by Noah Smith – interesting article, although it lacks some nuance about Chinese development, consider it a starting point that you can explore in more depth from, rather than the full story
I have alluded to the impact of China’s new espionage law. VisualPolitik has pulled together a good video on how it’s being interpreted by multinationals, policy wonks and politicians. It will have precisely the opposite impact that China would like it to have on its economy.
Consumer behaviour
How many Britons agree with Andrew Tate’s views on women? | YouGov – so much in this. You also need to think about bias in questions, that its done online and the ‘you can think it, but you shouldn’t say it’ aspect of how Tate supporters might think about the questions
Interesting debate on how the ‘evangelical bloc’ has evolved over time from being primarily theological to being primarily political in nature.
How doctors buy their way out of trouble | Reuters – When federal enforcers alleged in 2015 that New York surgeon Feng Qin had performed scores of medically unnecessary cardiac procedures on elderly patients, they decided not to pursue a time-consuming criminal case. Instead, prosecutors chose an easier, swifter legal strategy: a civil suit. Qin agreed to pay $150,000 in a negotiated settlement and walked free to perform more cardiac surgeries at his new solo practice in lower Manhattan. Qin faced no judge or jury. He did not admit to wrongdoing. He maintained his license to practice. What’s more, neither Qin nor government officials were required to notify patients who purportedly were subjected to vascular surgical procedures they didn’t need. Those included fistulagrams to spot issues like narrowed blood vessels or clots, and angioplasties to open clogged coronary arteries. Within months of the settlement, a registered nurse working for Qin at his Manhattan practice alerted authorities that something seemed amiss. The nurse, who ultimately turned whistleblower, alleged to federal prosecutors that the surgeon was performing unnecessary procedures on patients, mostly elderly Asian and Black immigrants whose care was covered by the public programs Medicare or Medicaid. Prosecutors indicted Qin in 2018 on a felony count of fraud, which carried a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison. But in 2021, in a deal brokered behind closed doors, prosecutors dropped that charge in favor of yet another civil settlement, court records detailing that agreement show. Once again, Qin kept his New York license to practice with no restrictions; a restricted license is one of the few ways the public can learn that a doctor has been disciplined for bad behavior. Qin agreed to pay a total of $800,000 in annual installments ending in December 2025, deposited with the U.S. Department of the Treasury. As an added penalty, he was banned from billing public health programs until February 2025
Their inability to live up to the past German reputation for quality
Chinese manufacturers at the low-end
German automobile makers struggles with software
Japanese and Korean car manufacturers challenging the luxury end of the market. I would rather have a Lexus LX than a G-Wagen. At the moment Lexus have had to shut down the list on the LX they are that oversold
Hong Kong
chanhiu design – really nice graphic design. I love their project reflecting on Hong Kong-made knock-off toys familiar to Hong Kong children as well as European children – where these toys turned up in markets during the 1960s through to the early 1980s. More here: Chan Hiu explores Hong Kong’s playful past – The China Project
Cayman Islands fights attempts by Singapore and Hong Kong to lure Asia’s wealthy | Financial Times – the sharp uptake of Singapore vehicles versus Hong Kong vehicles is very interesting – an order of 10x magnitude greater. Interesting implications for Hong Kong’s wealth management business and China’s efforts to prevent capital flight from Greater China. It also implies that Hong Kong hasn’t been as successful at attracting foreign funds for investment in China. So the Hong Kong pivot towards the Middle East investor makes sense.
Apple expanding supplier base in China, Southeast Asia, and India – the number of manufacturing facilities/locations of Apple’s top 200 suppliers grew in 2022 in China, Japan, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, and India. However, manufacturing facilities/locations in the US and South Korea have dropped from 72 to 62 and 42 to 36, respectively. The latest list shows that Apple’s supplier base in South and Southeast Asia is growing amid Apple’s diversification move. Meanwhile, Apple keeps expanding its reliance on China, a sign that Apple is likely to prepare for a decoupled global manufacturing ecosystem. Due to Apple’s change of methodology, disclosing only “locations” instead of “facilities,” the numbers of certain geographies, including Taiwan, cannot be compared historically. For example, Apple said that TSMC had five “facilities” globally in 2021 but had three manufacturing “locations” globally in 2022. The methodology change led to fewer listed manufacturing locations of Apple suppliers in Taiwan, from 72 to 41
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.
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 bookThe 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
