First there were Robber Barons, then Conglomerateurs. Later came Masters of the Universe. Every era generates its own macho power icons. The Information Age is no exception. Three new books bring us the latest mythic heroes of commerce: Highwaymen, Ironmen, and Hero Architects — they’re the bad-asses of the digital frontier. But when you take the real measure of these men, their badness falls a little short of the bone.
Moguls Will Be Men
In “The Highwaymen: Tycoons, Technology and the Coming World of Electronic Communications” (1997, Random House), Ken Auletta assembles a loose brotherhood of tycoons, players, and visionaries from the information and entertainment industries. These are the “highwaymen” of the title (the highway is, of course, now electronic — get it?), and we’ve seen them all before. In fact we’ve seen most of this book before in the last five years of Auletta’s “New Yorker” profiles, which depict such A-list moguls as John Malone, Bill Gates, Michael Eisner, Sumner Redstone, Rupert Murdoch, Michael Ovitz, Frank Biondi, and Ted Turner in flagrante delicto, closing and blocking deals.
As much as he’d love for us to think of these CEOs as swashbuckling rogues, Auletta basically gives us businessmen making business decisions. Some are sound, some not. And, as often as not, they reveal themselves to be querulous eccentrics fraught with human frailties. Otherwise, Auletta just basks in his role as a fly on the wall in the corridors of power.
Recommendation: Best to rummage through that pile of old “New Yorkers” for Auletta’s columns.
Glass Houses
Robert Reid’s “Architects of the Web: 1000 Days that Built the Future of Business”(1997, John Wiley & Sons) promises the story of the dawn of an era. It delivers a parade of warmed-over puff pieces on the freshest faces in the Internet business. Reid casts this group — including Netscape’s Marc Andreessen, C|Net’s Halsey Minor, I/PRO’s Ariel Poler, and honorary female Kim Polese of Marimba — as hero architects in the tradition of Ayn Rand’s Howard Roark.
他们拉所有夜间！他们找到支持者！他们提出了吸引人的名字！否则，Reid的故事不仅仅是Plodding，还对一系列互联网构建块的出生和商业化的公开说明。
Recommendation: If you’ve slept through the IPO frenzy of the last two years, skim it. Otherwise, skip it.
Pulp Fiction
Po Bronson professes that his Silicon Valley novel, “The First $20 Million is Always the Hardest” (1997, Random House, http://users.aol.com/pobronson/hardest.htm), is not a roman a clef about high-tech heavy hitters (“I considered titling this ‘Not Gates'”), but a tribute to all the aspiring entrepreneurs “cheated by the gatekeepers of power.” Yet, the specter of the Ur-gatekeeper haunts this potboiler about a lowly code tester who ultimately outsmarts a Machiavellian executive and invents the killer app for fast, cheap, ubiquitous network computing along the way.
没关系，布朗森的影子大亨比商业媒体的神话真实的真实人物更可取。“第一笔$ 2000万美元”很有趣。它具有决斗技术，深夜编码马拉松，一家初创公司和夸张的IPO都包裹在锤子情节中，并带有有抱负的“ Ironmen”（请阅读“ Next Next Gates”）。
Still, the book reads like a breezy film treatment. If only Bronson could write dialogue the way his characters write code.
Recommendation：适合商务读者的小说；真正的小说迷应该等待电影。
Nick Paumgarten（paumgar@aol.com）是“纽约观察家”的记者。