©2003 Gilder Technology Report,
a joint publication of Gilder Publishing LLC and Forbes, Inc.
All Rights Reserved.

Gilder's Book of the Month
Gilder's Book of the Month recommended reading list is pulled from George Gilder's own library.
All books are available for purchase through Amazon.com.

January 2004

The Long Walk
by Slavomir Rawicz
Order Your Copy Today !

After spending much of my holiday reading time with estimable critics of the Telecosm such as Om Malik (Broadbandits) and David Denby (American Sucker), I innocently picked up a book called The Long Walk by Slavomir Rawicz, defying the most urgent warnings from historian Stephen Ambrose that I would not be able to put it down. Sure enough, the darn book adhered to my hands for the next two days-in the bathtub, under the Christmas tree, at lunch, and in the car to cross-country ski races-and I emerged from my ordeal with an inspiring new perspective on all the trials of this Millennium. Incarcerated in a concentration camp in north eastern Siberia, Rawicz and six colleagues escaped during a blizzard, and most of them managed to elude dogs, KGB, apparently abominable snowmen, and marauding Chinese soldiers, and make their way nearly 4000 miles in 18 months through the Siberian snows and the Gobi desert and through Mongolia and Tibet and over the Himalayas to India. Full of fascinating details of survival against all odds both in the desert and the mountains, in sub zero and trans-100 Farenheits. Perhaps there is still hope for the all optical revelation.

— George Gilder

Previous Books of the Month

The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth
by Clayton M. Christensen, Michael E. Raynor
Order Your Copy

Towering over his colleagues in business analysis, Clayton Christensen has proven that he is not just another tall white guy who hangs around the basket and piles up the easy points.

After introducing a champion product at the top of his game six years ago, garnering huge markets, magisterial prestige, devoted students, and a double chair at the Harvard Business School, Christensen triumphantly flouts his own chilling odds against renewing a stalled franchise. Written with colleague Michael Raynor, his second book is a whopper of a further innovation: The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth, even more gripping and compelling than his first work. His famous core concept of disruptive innovation, launched in his now classic prize winner The Innovator's Dilemma, has begotten a scintillating sequel, full of powerful business ideas that continue spinning in the mind long after you put down the book.

Using an insight of my partner Nick Tredennick, I would like to sum up Christensen's initial theory as a form of Tredennick's law: "Seek performance first and you forgo volume. Seek volume first and you get performance."

Catchy isn't it? The essence of it is the learning curve. Creating a high performance product is only the first step. If you make one brilliant prototype of a magical Silicon Wonderchip XXX, and then embark on an agenda of costly performance improvements, you will restrict yourself to a sparse population of elite users. In the end, this small market of demanding buyers-whether of high-end cameras or high-end routers or specialized business communications-will not be able to pay for the early rate of improvement. Meanwhile your rival-Intel, perhaps-incorporates an inferior ripoff on some underused corner of a Pentium and makes billions of units. Moving down the learning curve of the semiconductor industry with Moore's law, the Pentium will soon be doing the job more cheaply and better than your Silicon WonderchipXXX."

Now in The Innovator's Solution, Christensen offers a broader, more far reaching, but less quantitative, discourse on business strategy. He tells executives why "core competence" shouldn't necessarily be your core business; when to outsource and when not; how to avoid the grim reaper of business-"commoditization"; how to develop products by asking the question "What job needs to get done?"; why large mergers almost never work; and how to counter disruptive threats-and even become the disrupter yourself-by forming autonomous organizations.

Christensen is full of sagely contrarian advice: he argues that it is usually better to give a new project to an executive who has previously failed at a similar undertaking, rather than one who has been highly successful in an unrelated field. The learning curve, in other words, applies to management not just manufacturing. He also shows how, depending on the circumstances, technologies can be disruptive for some firms but sustaining for others. The Internet, for example, sustained Dell's low-cost direct-to-customer marketing and distribution model but disrupted the retail models of Compaq, HP, IBM, and others.

Perhaps most importantly, Christensen and Raynor demolish the myth that young companies should be impatient for growth and patient for profits. Just the opposite, they argue. Demands for early profitability are good because they force new companies to adjust their business models based on feedback, rather than assuming the model is perfect from the outset, only to find out years later that the initial business plan was fatally flawed.

Christensen and Raynor's chapter endnotes-substantial, pithy, provocative-add further relish to a feast of business ideas.

-George Gilder & Bret Swanson

Wall Street Meat
by Andy Kessler
Order Your Copy

Our old friend and Telecosm star Andy Kessler has minced and marketed WALL STREET MEAT, the most riotous, insightful, poignant, gossipy, and gallivanting book on Wall Street ever written. Unlike the telepathic Michael Lewis, whose Liar's Poker was mostly written at three removes from the major players of the 1980s, Kessler was embedded big time, for both the eighties and nineties and he is still prescient in the new era. No fly or flower on the wall, Kessler was a major player on the field, a double-E from Bell Labs who actually grasped the intricacies of the technologies that he analyzed and they touted. He often told these Wall Street stars the score, or bit a bruised tongue dumbstruck when they did their daffy dunderheaded thing anyway. Then he went off and formed a hedge fund with Fred Kittler and scored on his own.

He was there as Bill Gates cackled at the credulity of analysts rushing to the phones to report a calculated putdown of his own stock; Kessler was at Jack Grubman's side as he honed his ax, his "A," his Ebbers and his AWE-strike, boasting three fictitious women per night, ten beers and four uncanny earning calls. Kessler was there, carrying true believer Mary Meeker's sachel as she rushed to her limo to tout her famous "feelings" about clueless.com to clueless dotty investors; he had frank conversations with Quattrone about the "monkeys in suits" that end up as brokers, and he did analytical hanky panky side by side with Blodget.

But unlike most of the inebriated cast of this rollicking tale, Kessler never lost his head or sense of proportion. He got out on top, with his humor, writing flair, integrity, and portfolio intact. And he is about to get even richer on this self-published book, which has already leapt high at Amazon, where it tops the list at Morgan Stanley and Lehman Bros, is number 19 in New York and is moving up everywhere else.

This book may have begun in the boutique insider cult trade but it will be a bulge bracket paperback soon and then--I have a heart-felt feeling here, a Meeker moment--it will be a major motion picture. Read it before Kessler goes Hollywood and becomes too famous to talk to you anymore. George Gilder

Valuing Technology
The New Science of Wealth in the Knowledge Economy
by Chris Westland
Order Your Copy

In this ambitious and original text, Chris Westland follows in the path of Aswath Damodaran, casting light on "The Dark Side of Valuation" of technology stocks. But where Damodaran stops short of addressing the fundamental issues of technology itself, the polymathic Westland—a scientist and
consultant—cruises in with observations on Moore's and Metcalfe's laws, nanotechnology and optics, biotech and materials science. He attempts to formalize in crisp mathematics some of the "laws" of the microcosm and telecosm.
A fascinating read that does not pretend there are any simple answers or panaceas. — George Gilder

The Advent of the Algorithm
by David Berlinski
Order Your Copy

Don't be put off by the author's vagaries and discursions. They are sometimes poetic and funny, sometimes distracting, but if you press on, you will encounter a unique tale of the real meaning of the science and technology of the twentieth century-the overthrow of the materialist superstition in the heart of mathematics physics, biology, and computer science. Berlinski was a student of Alonzo Church, who was the most fruitful protÈgÈ of Kurt Godel, who defined the limits of mathematics and tutored Einstein. This contrarian tour de force is a gripping adventure in the ideas that matter in the 21st century as it transcends and surpasses the 20th. —George Gilder

Mind at Light Speed
by David D. Nolte
Order Your Copy

A leading physicist, solid state theorist, and inventor of dynamic holography, Nolte has reshaped telecosmic theory for the 21st century. Describing the promise of an all optical Internet and the limitations of human vision, he envisages a new computing and networking architecture based on the massive parallelism of holograms. With Avanex and Terabeam both gaining competitive advantage through holographic techniques, with Essex pursuing the huge advantages of analog optical processing, and with Carver Mead transforming the camera in the image of the human retina, Nolte¹s book is a paradigm tour. Lucidly written for the layman, it explores the parallel advantages of light and image in the new era of optics. He ends with an intriguing discussion of quantum computing.
In the Beginning Was the Command Line
by Neal Stephenson
Order Your Copy

In the Beginning Was the Command Line-is a fast, funny, and uncannily perceptive history of computer operating systems by the incomparable Neal Stephenson, author of Cryptonomicon, a panoramic historical novel which was one of the first and best of our books of the month. A former programmer, Stephenson explains in savvy and acrobatic prose the contribution of Microsoft and its obsolescence today, and explains why Linux is real—why operating systems will all be essentially free and open sourced.
Machine Beauty
by David Gelernter
Order Your Copy

Machine Beauty by David Gelernter explains and expounds the assumptions behind his transfiguration of the user interface through his company Mirror Worlds, named after his prophetic book by the same title, which essentially outlined the key features of the ultimate World Wide Web (still under construction today). Gelernter is an essential guide to the future of computer interfaces and databases.
The Quantum Brain
by Jeffrey Satinover
The Search for Freedom and the Next Generation of Man
Order Your Copy

The Quantum Brain is an adventure in the science of ideas. It is the first book on the brain that combines a grasp of the physics of the microcosm and the technologies of artificial intelligence, neural networks, and self-organizing systems, with a recognition of the transcendant properties that define the mind and differentiate it from matter. Although the subject is inherently difficult and novel, Jeffrey Satinover is an inspired guide through the fertile areas of convergence among the pivotal sciences of the age. From such insights will emerge both new technologies and new philosophies and theologies for the Twenty First Century.
Basic Economics
A Citizen's Guide to the Economy
by Thomas Sowell
Order Your Copy

Thomas Sowell is widely known as a masterly writer on the intricacies of race and culture around the globe. His recent autobiography offers a fascinating vista into his amazing life battling the forces of political correctness on issues of race. But Sowell began as a superb economic theorist, bringing to light the foundational principles of supply side economics in Says Law ("Supply creates its own demand") and Knowledge and Decisions. Now he has summed up a lifetime of economic wisdom in this definitive text, Basic Economics: A Citizen's Guide to the Economy. He offers pithy and trenchant accounts of a wide range of issues, from the perversity of rent controls and the wastefulness of recycling to the irrelevance of sex and race in income data and the true role of government in economy.
Collective Electrodynamics
Quantum Foundations of Electromagnetism
by Carver A. Mead
Order Your Copy

The book of the month (and perhaps of the decade; time will tell) is Collective Electrodynamics by Carver Mead, written is his copious free time while launching a revolution in the camera business with the Foveon imager. Mead's climactic speech at Telecosm, ending with a prolonged standing ovation, focused less on Foveon's amazing new chip and its impact on cameras than on his new book and its promise of a revolution in the physics of the electromagnetic spectrum. Some mathematics afflicts about two-thirds of the chapters, but the rest are readable and riveting.
The Holy Grail of Data Storage Management
What Every Enterprise Needs to Know to Solve Its Data Deluge
by Jon William Toigo
Order Your Copy

An excellent primer on network storage-perhaps the only in depth, book length treatment of the subject. The book does, however, suffer from conventional thinking. In particular, Toigo buys into the flawed notion that the number one reason for SAN architectures is to save network bandwidth. Recommended as good background reading on enterprise storage.

Visit Gilder's Book of the Month Archive