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Review:
The First $20 Million Is Always The Hardest by Po Bronson

Every so often, a book turns up that has the words Product Marketing Exercise running through it like bugs through Windows 95. This is one. You can see the publisher's checklist now. Thrusting young Wired contributor as author - check. Bright orange cover with big @ in the middle - check. Silicon Valley intrigue - check. High-tech, high finance, low life, nerds everywhere - check. How on earth could such a product possibly fail?

Let me count the ways. For a start, there's the premise. A charitable research establishment - you what? - has been given the task of designing a processor to compete with the Pentium, for a chip company called Omega (if you ever meet a chip company that farms out its top projects in that way, shoot it). In a rather complex bit of double-dealing, some would-be engineers on that project are put onto a different one, that of building the mythical mass-market $300 computer. Despite the fact that every hardware company in existence since Commodore has been frothing at the parallel port to make such a toy, in this book it's seen as social death to even contemplate it.

Then there's the plot. Along the way, the team leave the company: they invent the Network Computer and Java -- all called something else, of course - and a bright new dawn hits Silicon Valley. All in the face of concerted, if rather uncertain, opposition from a variety of sources. If you like hot talk about corporate financing options, you're in for a treat.

Then there's the technical side. This is so riddled with non-sequiturs that even listing them would fill this review: suffice to say that if you're building a new computer, you don't start by finding a few spare motherboards onto which your circuit design will magically transmute. If you're writing low-level software, you don't decide to give out the source code because it's small and therefore fast enough not to need to be compiled. Mostly, it's just plain wrong.

Then there's the characters: they look a bit like engineers and say the right sort of things, as long as you don't know better. If you've ever met (or worse, been) an engineer in research and development, the similarity between the characters and reality look like the similarities between The Vicar of Dibley and the Archbishop of Canterbury.

It's dreary fiction, nonsensical technically and generally drab. But it comes in a bright orange cover, the guy gets the girl and if you've got no idea what Bronson is on about it can be mildly convincing. Me, I'll stick to what actually happens in Silicon Valley: it's a lot more exciting, the people are dafter and you get to learn stuff. Like, one hopes, how to pitch a better book than this at a hungry publisher.

RG

 
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