Free The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story by Michael Lewis Page B

such a place ever grow old? The answer was: painfully.
    After the retreat Ed McCracken quickly set about making his company less like Jim Clark. This is just how it always went with one of these new Silicon Valley hardware companies: once it showed promise, it ditched its visionary founder, who everyone deep down thought was a psycho anyway, and became a sane, ordinary place. With the support of Glenn Mueller and the other venture capitalists on the board of directors, McCracken brought in layer upon layer of people more like him: indirect, managerial, diplomatic, politically minded. These people could never build the machines of the future, but they could sell the machines of the present. And they did this very well. For the next six years Silicon Graphics was perhaps the most successful company in Silicon Valley. The stock rose from three dollars a share to more than thirty dollars a share. The company grew from two hundred employees to more than six thousand. The annual revenues swelled from a few million to billions. Therapy aside, the company remained the most desirable place to work if you were a certain kind of computer cowboy who wanted to live on the edge of the technology. The technology Clark and his brilliant engineers had invented turned out to be just what the world hungered for.
    At the same time McCracken dealt Clark out of his own business. From McCracken’s point of view Clark was just wildly disruptive. He’d wander around the company stirring up all manner of trouble and cause all the engineers to become even more highly oppositional than they were on their own. Senior engineers turned up in his office and told him that the chairman (Clark) had persuaded them they’d be better off quitting Silicon Graphics and starting their own businesses, and McCracken would have to spend hours talking them into staying. But he found outlets for his own frustration. When McCracken joined the company in 1985, Glenn Mueller had assured both him and Clark that they would be paid the same amounts each year. In late 1989 McCracken called Mueller, who now chaired the executive compensation committee, to complain about this rule. Mueller phoned the other members of the committee and changed the policy. The next year McCracken was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars more than Clark. Not long after that Clark ceased to be granted stock options in his company. He was the only member of the executive committee so treated.
    Given what happened later, it is easy to feel sorry for Ed McCracken. At the time it was harder. Having established himself as the captain of the ship, he was doing what captains of industry have done since they were invented. He was transforming himself into an Important Person. He chaired conferences of the future of American industry. He hobnobbed with U.S. senators and testified before Congress. He encouraged the 1992 Clinton campaign to use Silicon Graphics as a backdrop for an important speech by Clinton on economic policy—only to find, too late, that Clark had decorated the halls that Clinton strode along with the Fortune magazine cover that featured Clark. Once Clinton was elected president, McCracken became a regular at White House dinners. Such highfalutin behavior might not sit well with Clark’s engineers, who accused him of not paying attention to the business, but it had a purpose: it created an air of permanence not merely about Ed McCracken but also about Silicon Graphics. McCracken was trying to build something enduring.
    Order and hierarchy were essential to this process. McCracken was uncomfortable with even the most trivial challenges to his authority—which is to say that he lived in a state of perpetual discomfort. The engineers, inspired by Clark, were constantly challenging his authority.
    The practical jokes were a case in point. An engineer’s idea of a joke is a practical joke, perhaps because a practical joke, unlike the less practical kind, needs to be designed. It requires