The Code
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CHAPTER 21: MAGNA CARTA
1. Esther Dyson et al., “Cyberspace and the American Dream: A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age” (Release 1.2, August 22, 1994), The Information Society 12, no. 3 (1996): 295–308; Boyce Rensberger, “White House Science Advisor is Cheerleader for Reagan,” The Washington Post, November 12, 1985, A6; Philip M. Boffey, “Science Advisor Moves Beyond Rocky First Year,” The New York Times, October 20, 1982, B8; Henry Allen, “The Word According to Gilder,” The Washington Post, February 18, 1981, B1; Edward Rothstein, “The New Prophet of a Techno Faith Rich in Profits,” The New York Times, September 23, 2000, B9; Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006), 229. Also see Paulina Borsook, Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp Through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High Tech (New York: PublicAffairs, 2000).
2. Paulina Borsook, “Release,” Wired 1:5 (November 1993); “Esther Dyson,” in Internet: A Historical Encyclopedia, vol. 2, ed. Laura Lambert, Chris Woodford, Hilary W. Poole, Christos J. P. Moschovitis (Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO, 2005), 88–92. Other important connectors in the Internet-age Valley salon were Tim O’Reilly and Stewart Alsop, each of whom built influential empires around annual conferences and publications aimed at the industry.
3. Quoted in Lambert et al., “Esther Dyson.”
4. See, for example, Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron’s incendiary take on Silicon Valley mythmaking, “The Californian Ideology,” Science as Culture 6, no. 1 (January 1996): 44–72. On the National Performance Review, see Al Gore, The Gore Report on Reinventing Government: Creating a Government that Works Better and Costs Less (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1993). Silicon Valley also played a role in this plank of the Clinton-Gore agenda; the Vice President hailed Sunnyvale (whose then mayor was Larry Stone) as a national example of and test bed for municipal reinvention, and several policies originating there became final recommendations of the performance review.
5. Claudia Dreifus, “Present Shock,” The New York Times, June 11, 1995, SM46.
6. Dyson, “Friend and Foe,” Wired, August 1, 1995, https://www.wired.com/1995/08/newt/, archived at https://perma.cc/NCP6-FHBP; Dyson et al., “Cyberspace and the American Dream.”
7. Gingrich, remarks at the launch of Thomas.gov, January 5, 1995, Washington, D.C.
8. John Heilemann, “The Making of the President 2000,” WIRED, December 1, 1995, https://www.wired.com/1995/12/gorenewt/.
9. Daniel Pearl, “Futurist Schlock,” The Wall Street Journal, September 7, 1995, 1.
10. Brett D. Fromson and Jay Mathews, “Executives Wary But Hopeful About Prospects,” The Washington Post, November 10, 1994, B13; David Hewson, “McNealy Trains His Sights on Computing’s Big Guns,” The Sunday Times (UK), January 28, 1996, via Nexis Uni (accessed August 30, 2018).
11. Mitch Betts, “The Politicizing of Cyberspace,” Computerworld 29, no. 3 (January 16, 1995): 20.
12. John Heilemann, “The Making of the President 2000.”
13. Philip Elmer-Dewitt, “Online Erotica: On a Screen Near You,” Time, June 24, 2001, http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,134361,00.html, archived at https://perma.cc/DX42-A8JD [inactive].
14. Kara Swisher and Elizabeth Corcoran, “Gingrich Condemns On-Line Decency Act,” The Washington Post, June 22, 1995, D8; Steve Lohr, “A Complex Medium That Will Be Hard to Regulate,” The New York Times, June 13, 1996, B10; Nat Hentoff, “The Senate’s Cybercensors,” The Washington Post, July 1, 1995, A27; 47 U.S. Code, Section 230.
15. Daniel S. Greenberg, “Porn Does the Internet,” The Washington Post, July 16, 1997, A19.
16. Elizabeth Darling, “Farewell to David Packard,” Palo Alto Times, April 3, 1996, https://www.paloaltoonline.com/weekly/morgue/news/1996_Apr_3.PACKARD.html, archived at https://perma.cc/5B2A-HDPE.
17. Becky Morgan, interview with the author, May 13, 2016, by phone; Jim Cunneen, interview with the author, February 1, 2016, San Jose, Calif.; Tom Campbell interview; Ed Zschau interviews.
18. History of the National Economic Council and Clinton Administration History Project, “NEC—Education/Technology Initiative [2],” Clinton Digital Library, accessed August 7, 2017, https://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/items/show/4837.
19. William J. Clinton: “Remarks on NetDay in Concord, California,” March 9, 1996, posted by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/222473, archived at https://perma.cc/48LT-X5ZB.
20. Regis McKenna, interviews with the author; Don Bauder, “Out of Prison, Living in Luxury,” San Diego Reader, May 26, 2010, https://www.sandiegoreader.com/news/2010/may/26/city-light-1/#, archived at https://perma.cc/3WAB-GD6P; Karen Donovan, “Bloodsucking Scumbag,” Wired, November 1, 1996, https://www.wired.com/1996/11/es-larach/, archived at https://perma.cc/8TC6-JDRX.
21. Douglas Jehl, “Clinton to Fight Measure Revising Rules on Lawsuits,” The New York Times, March 6, 1995, A1; Jerry Knight, “A Measure of Security on Securities Suits,” The Washington Post, December 7, 1995, B11; Mark Simon, “Even Republicans Endorse Clinton,” San Francisco Chronicle, August 21, 1996, C1.
22. John Markoff, “A Political Fight Marks a Coming of Age for a Silicon Valley Titan,” The New York Times, October 21, 1996, D1.
23. John Doerr, “The Coach,” interview by John Brockman, 1996, Edge.org, https://www.edge.org/digerati/doerr/, archived at https://perma.cc/9KWX-GLWK.
24. Lawrence (Larry) Stone, interview with the author, April 7, 2015, San Jose, Calif.; Sara Miles, How to Hack a Party Line: The Democrats and Silicon Valley (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001); Philip Trounstine, “Clinton Opposes Lawsuit Measure,” San Jose Mercury News, August 8, 1996, A1.
25. “Telephone Conversation with President Bill Clinton, Vice President Al Gore, and California Technology Executives,” The White House, August 20, 1996, History of the Office of the Vice President and Clinton Administration History Project, “OVP—Gore Tech/Tech Outreach [1],” Clinton Digital Library, accessed August 10, 2017, https://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/items/show/5066.
26. Mark Simon, “GOP Voice in Silicon Valley,” The San Francisco Chronicle, September 25, 1996, A13.
27. T. J. Rodgers, “Why Silicon Valley Should Not Normalize Relations with Washington, D.C.,” Cato Institute, 1997.
28. Tom Campbell, interview with the author, February 17, 2016; Luis Buhler, interview with the author, February 8, 2016, by phone; Markoff, “A Political Fight Marks a Coming of Age.”
29. Michelle Quinn, “Valley Execs Celebrate Decisive Ballot Victory,” The San Jose Mercury News, November 6, 1996, EL1.
30. Brockman, “The Coach.”
31. Lizette Alvarez, “High-Tech Industry, Long Shy of Politics, Is Now Belle of Ball,” The New York Times, December 26, 1999, 1.
CHAPTER 22: DON’T BE EVIL
1. Michele Matassa Flores, “Gore Tells CEOs to Put Their Hearts Into It,” The Seattle Times, May 9, 1997, A18; Howard Fineman, “The Microsoft Primary,” Newsweek, May 19, 1997, 55; Alex Fryer, “Gates’ Techno-Home Still a Work in Progress,” The Seattle Times, May 7, 1997, A1.
2. “Microsoft Juggernaut Keeps on Rolling,” The Los Angeles Times, April 20, 1994, 4; Clinton, Speech at Shoreline Community College, February 24, 1996, Office of Speechwriting; and James (Terry) Edmonds, “Seattle, WA (Shoreline Community College) 2/24/96 [1],” Clinton Digital Library, accessed August 15, 2017, https://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/items/show/33816. Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold was on the White House NII advisory council; the Silicon Valley-heavy Gore-Tech meetings of 1997 did not include Microsoft representatives.
3. BusinessWeek, February 24, 1992, quoted in Gary L. Reback, Free the Market! Why Only Government Can Keep the Marketplace Competitive (New York: Portfolio, 2009).
4. John Heilemann,
Pride Before the Fall: The Trials of Bill Gates and the End of the Microsoft Era (New York: CollinsBusiness, 2001), 58, 91.
5. Karen Southwick, High Noon: The Inside Story of Scott McNealy and the Rise of Sun Microsystems (New York: Wiley, 1999), 45, 48.
6. Bill Gates, The Road Ahead (New York: Random House, 1995), x. Andreessen later said he was requoting 3Com’s Bob Metcalfe when he made that famous Windows slam; see Chris Anderson, “The Man Who Makes the Future,” Wired, April 24, 2014, https://www.wired.com/2012/04/ff-andreessen/, archived at https://perma.cc/6D5K-XGWJ.
7. Gates, Memorandum, “The Internet Tidal Wave,” May 26, 1995, Exhibit 20, United States v. Microsoft Corporation 253 F.3d 34 (D.C. Cir. 2001).
8. Reback, Free the Market!; Heilemann, Pride Before the Fall, 64–67; Joel Brinkley and Steve Lohr, The U.S. v. Microsoft: The Inside Story of the Landmark Case (New York: McGraw-Hill Education, 2000), 4, 48–49.
9. Time, “The Golden Geeks,” February 19, 1996, cover; “Whose Web Will It Be?,” September 16, 1996, cover.
10. James Lardner, “Trying to Survive the Browser Wars,” U.S. News & World Report 124, no. 13 (April 6, 1998); Heilemann, Pride Before the Fall, 91.
11. Brinkely and Lohr, The U.S. v. Microsoft, 38–40.
12. Heilemann, Pride Before the Fall, 42.
13. James Taranto, “Nader’s Raiders Try to Storm Bill’s Gates,” The Wall Street Journal, November 18, 1997, A22; Nader, “The Microsoft Menace,” Slate, October 30, 1997, http://www.slate.com/articles/briefing/articles/1997/10/the_microsoft_menace.html, archived at https://perma.cc/9ZEQ-8UWK.
14. Elizabeth Corcoran and Rajiv Chandrasekaran, “Nader Joins Chorus of Microsoft Critics,” The Washington Post, November 14, 1997, G1; Gerald F. Seib, “Freedom Fighters: Antitrust Suits Expand and Libertarians Ask, Who’s The Bad Guy?” The Wall Street Journal, June 9, 1998, A1.
15. Corcoran and Chandrasekaran, “Nader Joins Chorus.”
16. Neukom quoted in David Lawsky, “Microsoft Urges Government to Drop Antitrust Case,” Reuters, reprinted in The Times of India, November 26, 1998, 15; also see Steve Lohr, “Microsoft Presses Its View About Rivals’ 3-Way Deal,” The New York Times, January 7, 1999, C2.
17. Lizette Alvarez, “High-Tech Industry, Long Shy of Politics, Is Now Belle of Ball,” The New York Times, December 26, 1999, 1.
18. Hiren Shah, “Y2K: The Bug of the Millennium,” The Times of India, October 19, 1998, 14; Stephen Barr, “Social Security Killed Y2K Bug, President Says,” The Washington Post, December 29, 1998, A2; Eric Lipton, “2-Digit Problem Means 9-Digit Bill for Local Governments,” The Washington Post, August 4, 1998, A1.
19. Abhi Raghunathan, “Thanks for Coming. Now Go,” The New York Times, July 15, 2001, NJ1.
20. Kathleen Kenna, “Commander in Geek,” Toronto Star, May 24, 1999, 1; Paul A. Gigot, “Gore Slams Doerr on Silicon Valley,” The Wall Street Journal, May 21, 1999, 21.
21. Jon Swartz, “Tech’s Star Capitalist,” The San Francisco Chronicle, November 13, 1997, D3; Marc Gunther and Adam Lashinsky, “Cleanup Crew,” Fortune 156, no. 11 (November 26, 2007): 82–92.
22. Quoted in John Schwartz, “A Judge Overturned by an Appearance of Bias,” The New York Times, June 29, 2001, p. C1.
23. Joel Brinkley, “U.S. vs. Microsoft: The Lobbying,” The New York Times, September 7, 2001, C5.
24. Quoted in Alvarez, “High-Tech Industry.”
25. James Gibbons, interview with the author, November 4, 2015.
26. “Bill Gates Stanford Dedication—Jan. 30, 1996,” Microsoft News, https://news.microsoft.com/1996/01/30/bill-gates-stanford-dedication-jan-30-1996/, archived at https://perma.cc/XCK6-9SS6.
27. Ellen Ullman, Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017), 100.
28. “Turning an Info-Glut into a Library,” Science 266 (October 7, 1994), 20; Bruce Schatz and Hsinchun Chen, “Building Large-Scale Digital Libraries,” Computer 29, no. 5 (May 1996): 22–26.
29. John Battelle, The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture (New York: Portfolio, 2005), 65–75; Rich Scholes, “Uniquely Google,” Stanford Technology Brainstorm, Stanford Office of Technology Licensing, March 2000.
30. Scholes, “Uniquely Google.”
31. Battelle, The Search, 90; “Sergey Brin’s Home Page,” http://infolab.stanford.edu/~sergey/, accessed May 20, 2018, archived at https://perma.cc/XH2S-RW58.
ARRIVALS
1. Chamath Palihapitiya, interview with the author, December 5, 2017.
2. Walter Mossberg, “Behind the Lawsuit: Napster Provides Model for Music Distribution,” The Wall Street Journal, May 11, 2000, C1.
3. Cyrus Farivar, “Winamp’s Woes: How the Greatest MP3 Player Undid Itself,” Ars Technica, July 3, 2017; “The Biggest Media Merger Yet,” The New York Times, January 11, 2000, A24. On the AOL Time Warner merger and its effects, see Kara Swisher with Lisa Dickey, There Must Be a Pony in Here Somewhere: The AOL Time Warner Debacle (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2003).
CHAPTER 23: THE INTERNET IS YOU
1. Joint Venture Silicon Valley, 2002 Index (Palo Alto, Calif.: Joint Venture Silicon Valley, 2002); Gregory Zuckerman, “A Year After the Peak, How the Mighty Have Fallen,” The Wall Street Journal, March 5, 2001, C1; Scott Berinato, “What When Wrong at Cisco in 2001,” CIO Magazine 14, no. 20 (August 2001): 52–59.
2. Edward Helmore, “Lost Stock & Two Smoking Analysts,” The Guardian, March 15, 2001, B12.
3. Zach Schiller, “Morgenthaler Scores in IPO,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, March 4, 2000, C3; Alex Berenson, “Stocks End Gloomy First Quarter,” The New York Times, March 31, 2001, C1; Burt McMurtry, interview with the author, October 2, 2017; Ann Hardy, interview with the author, September 19, 2017.
4. Mike Tarsala, “Pets.com Killed by Sock Puppet,” MarketWatch, November 8, 2000, https://www.marketwatch.com/story/sock-puppet-kills-petscom, archived at https://perma.cc/T6WU-HKW5 [inactive]. Also see Jennifer Thornton and Sunny Marche, “Sorting through the dot bomb rubble: how did high-profile e-tailers fail?” International Journal of Information Management 23, no. 2 (April 2003): 121–38.
5. Joint Venture Silicon Valley, 2002 Index, 6–7; Julekha Dash, “Former dot-com workers find slow start in new year,” Computerworld, January 8, 2001, https://www.computerworld.com/article/2590192/it-careers/former-dot-com-workers-find-slow-start-in-new-year.html, archived at https://perma.cc/X4J2-JS7M.
6. Fred Vogelstein, “Google @ $165: Are These Guys for Real?,” Fortune, December 13, 2004, http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2004/12/13/8214226/index.htm, archived at https://perma.cc/YQU9-QV94; “Liorean,” comment thread “Google 1G Mail,” CodingForums.com, June 2, 2004, https://www.codingforums.com/geek-news-and-humour/39589-google-1g-mail.html, archived at https://perma.cc/549J-5HNY; also see Kevin Marks, “Epeus’ epigone,” March 21, 2012, http://epeus.blogspot.com/2012/03/when-youre-merchandise-not-customer.html, archived at https://perma.cc/EP7P-ZBTN.
7. “From the Garage to the Googleplex,” Alphabet, Inc., https://www.google.com/about/our-story/, archived at https://perma.cc/63XD-AZCA; “A Building Blessed with Tech Success,” CNET, October 14, 2002, https://www.cnet.com/news/a-building-blessed-with-tech-success/, archived at https://perma.cc/H4W8-RSJE; Verne Kopytoff, “The Internet Kid is Growing Up Fast,” The San Francisco Chronicle, September 11, 2000, A24.
8. Ken Auletta, Googled: The End of the World as We Know It (New York: Penguin Press, 2010), 20.
9. Stephanie Schorow, “Web heads go ga-ga for Google, for good reason,” Boston Herald, December 4, 2001, 51.
10. Fred Turner, “Burning Man at Google: a cultural infrastructure for new media production,” New Media & Society 11, nos. 1 & 2 (2009): 73–94; “Ten Principles of Burning Man,” https://burningman.org/culture/philosophical-center/10-principles/, archived a
t https://perma.cc/KS28-9M36.
11. Auletta, Googled, 80.
12. John Battelle, The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture (New York: Portfolio, 2005).
13. Google, “Ten things we know to be true,” https://www.google.com/intl/en/about/philosophy.html, archived at https://perma.cc/G865-BALX.
14. Doerr quoted in Matt Marshall, “Is Google Like Microsoft? In Some Ways,” The San Jose Mercury News, September 25, 2003, 1C.
15. Vogelstein, “Google @ $165.”
16. Shirin Sharif, “Web Site Allows Students to Make Friends from Faces in the Crowd,” The Stanford Daily, March 5, 2004, 1.
17. Sharif, “Web Site Allows”; U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Form S-1, Facebook, Inc., February 1, 2012.
18. On the emergence of social networking and the struggles and triumphs of its pre-Facebook companies, see Julia Angwin, Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Web Site in America (New York: Random House, 2009).
19. The definitive history of the early years of Facebook (and the basis for the not altogether charitable portrayal of Zuckerberg and his company in the 2011 Hollywood film The Social Network) is David Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company that is Connecting the World (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010).
20. This data comes from, naturally, Wikipedia. “List of most popular websites,” Wikipedia, March 2018, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_popular_websites, archived at https://perma.cc/9QBA-ABF6.
21. Lev Grossman, “You—Yes, You—Are TIME’s Person of the Year,” Time, December 25, 2006.
22. Esther Dyson et al., “Cyberspace and the American Dream: A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age” (Release 1.2, August 22, 1994), The Information Society 12, no. 3 (1996): 295–308.
23. Ryan Singel, “Silicon Valley Lacks Vision? Facebook Begs to Differ,” Wired, October 8, 2010, https://www.wired.com/2010/10/facebook-matters/, archived at https://perma.cc/VV4J-2JMS.