Like last year's hot new chip, Silicon Valley books are subject to their own kind of Moore's law: With the critical mass of hype doubling every 18 months, it's hard to winnow the signal from the noise.
The Silicon Boys is Newsweek technology reporter David A. Kaplan's attempt to write a sweeping, Tom Wolfe-style portrait of the birth of the computer industry from the first awkward semiconductor to today's embedded technology in everything from your doorbell to your car's fuel injection system.
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What we see is the transformation of a purely technological industry into one with (briefly) revolutionary undertones during the days when Steve Wozniak and other Homebrew Computer Club members dreamed that their inventions would change the world.
In the end, those inventions did change the world, but the revolution, like so many, became one about the accumulation of wealth, not the advancement of ideals.
It's easy to forget the stumbling randomness of technological advances. Despite daily evidence to the contrary, we tend to perceive "progress" as a forward marching line.
Kaplan, while laying out the undercurrents of the Silicon Valley, is smart enough and a good enough reporter not to engage in a blatant hagiography of the computer gods. Alongside the big breakthroughs he shows us failures and mistakes.
Atari multi-millionaire Nolan Bushnell tried to market life-sized home robots. Xerox failed to recognize the importance of its own invention, the graphical user interface. Apple's arrogance led to its market being devoured by Microsoft and the "IBM clone."
After an excellent historical introduction to the computer industry, Kaplan slips into a series of portraits of well-known valley legends like Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Andy Grove, Larry Ellison, and new kids like Marc Andreesen and Yahoo founders Jerry Yang and David Filo. It's here that Kaplan's book starts to lose traction.
The simple fact is this: no matter how you slice it, most computer nerds and their investment banker brothers-in-arms simply aren't exciting. For all his swashbuckling stature in the Valley, Larry Ellison's Ferrari-burning, skirt-chasing, jet-piloting antics are really just B-team rock star stuff. He may be the baddest boy in the Valley, but once you step outside of the pocket-protector set, he's really not that bad at all.
Likewise Jobs. Everyone has heard stories about what a prick he is: brilliant at marketing but controlling, devious, cutthroat. This is supposed to be news? Or pass for a compelling portrait? If that's all there is to Jobs, save the trees. Wozniak, perhaps, is the most interesting of all the profiles, because he largely walked away from greed and stuck to his original hacker ideals.
Like his own assessment that the Valley became all about the money, Kaplan's book falls victim to the same trap.
In the absence of much interesting physical action, and stuck with characters who express themselves better through code or business plans than through the spoken word, The Silicon Boys also becomes too much about the money. The accumulation of capital in the Valley is undoubtedly impressive, but Kaplan indulges too much Robin Leach-styled tongue wagging at all the wealth.
Still, for a quasi-insider look at this industry, Kaplan's book is well-written and interesting on the whole. The final chapter, in particular, is telling, visiting Ethernet inventor and 3Com founder Robert Metcalfe and his family on their self-imposed exile in Maine.
Reflecting back on what he left behind in Silicon Valley, Metcalfe observes the current state of the industry and says, "I'm a traditionalist. I think it's immoral for a company to go public without profits or reasonable projections thereof. But I was brought up in a different time."
Meanwhile, back in Silicon Valley, that sound you hear is a million IPOs hatching.
