Leslie Berlin
Autore di The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley
Sull'Autore
Leslie Berlin is Project Historian for the Silicon Valley Archives at Stanford University. A frequent commentator on Silicon Valley in the national media, she has two adult children and lives in Silicon Valley with her husband, whom she has known since they were both twelve years old.
Opere di Leslie Berlin
Etichette
Informazioni generali
- Data di nascita
- 1969-07-09
- Sesso
- female
- Nazionalità
- USA
- Istruzione
- Stanford University (Ph. D|History)
- Attività lavorative
- historian
Utenti
Recensioni
Potrebbero anche piacerti
Statistiche
- Opere
- 3
- Utenti
- 208
- Popolarità
- #106,482
- Voto
- 3.6
- Recensioni
- 3
- ISBN
- 19
I will focus this review on some surprises.
First it is surprising how recent some laws were.
1. Women could not work overtime before 1984 in California. So they could not earn higher overtime hourly rate, unlike their male coworkers.
2. People could not buy Apple IPO shares in Massachusetts because the state only allowed buying companies where the valuation was less than 5x book value. That would rule out the biggest and fastest technology companies today.
3. Atari arcade machines were not legal New York and Chicago because video game machines counted as pinball machines and pinball machines were not legal.
On the other side key legislation to enable high technology companies came about in the 1980s:
1. Capital gains tax was halved from previously matching income tax rate of 45%.
2. Pension funds were allowed to invest in risky assets ie venture capital funds. VCs were able to raise orders of magnitude more money and channel it into fast tracking disruptive innovators.
3. Bayh-Dole private recipients of public funding to patent invention and innovations from the funding.
4. Biotechnology techniques and genome sequences were made patentable, including fundamental techniques invented over many years by many scientists
Big companies make smart decisions that looks like stupid decisions from the perspective of innovators
1. Xerox is often derided for frittering away the innovations it had funded at the Xerox PARC lab. But Xerox made all its money back and more from the laser printer, invented at PARC.
2. IBM is often accused of having handed over its monopoly to Microsoft and its dominance to 100s of PC manufacturers by making its PCs an open hardware standard, open to any operating system. But the PC’s crushing defeat of Apple’s first-mover advantage was only possible because of these decisions, and IBM made a lot of money very quickly from its own PCs.
3. Warner bought and bankrupted Atari by not halting all investment in innovations and focusing on sales and marketing. But it made plenty of money from Atari just by bringing onboard Steven Spielberg to create an Atari game, which then pulled him to continue making highly profitable movies for the studio.
It is an extraordinary time to recount: even as the world was in crisis and stagflation, the innovators she picked out - each rarely reported on - was going through incredible journeys. It’s a pleasure to read.… (altro)