I wrote a book. The publication date is May 29, 2024 (if you’d rather not deal with Amazon, your bookstore can also order it from the distributor Ingram Spark, or print-on-demand if they have the equipment). You can read it for free here, although it’ll be in serial form. My fond hope is that you’ll find it so compelling that you just buy the book instead of waiting 8 months to see what happens. There will be a chapter each week, 33 in all.
In Chapter 7 everyone swaps places (except Janet) because that’s what we do in Silicon Valley. Here we conclude GO’s turn in the spotlight, as Microsoft screws them, and Matt’s wife Miriam just can’t understand it.
Reading in serial form has a long and honorable history. My cover artist sent me this “Read Like a Victorian” website. Enjoy.
=============== The Computer Biz =================
Miriam had the hardest time understanding the computer industry. Matt had to explain, over and over, that just because he was in a hot company (GO Corp.) that didn’t mean they were rich, yet. They couldn’t move to Atherton yet. And might never be able to, the way things were going. “If everyone thinks you’re great, why isn’t that enough?” was her attitude.
“Well, first you have to ship a product and make a profit,” he would explain. She’d interrupt him:
“OK, so when does that happen? Why does it take so long?”
She’d visited their offices and seen the prototypes, and he’d shown her the trade press articles about GO. They were all glowing. GO had a big partnership with IBM. So what was the hangup?
“Miriam, bringing out a PC product is like running with a bag of steaks through a pack of hungry hyenas, with a few lions watching from the bushes. And Marlin Perkins and David Attenborough narrating from a sound truck. The people you’re carrying the steaks for don’t even have a role to play yet.”
“What does that even mean?” she said, angrily.
“The lions are the giant companies, like Microsoft, Apple, IBM, and AT&T. The hyenas are the software developers and peripheral makers. And the Perkins and Attenborough team are the trade press,”
Miriam tried to take all that in. It was pretty overwhelming.
It was spring, 1991, and the top brass were all at Esther Dyson’s conference in Tucson, Arizona. The thing that Matt had worried about when he interviewed there was actually coming to pass: Microsoft was stabbing them in the back. He was hearing back from the conference that Microsoft was announcing their own “PenWindows,” a pen-based extension to Windows. Apparently they’d faked their “alliance” with GO, and now they were ripping them off.
Gates did this to everyone in the industry, so why was GO expecting anything else? Matt had seen up close how they’d taken advantage of 3Com to get their start in networking with “LAN Manager.” Whenever any company, anywhere, had any interesting technology for the PC, Microsoft acted like the street mobsters in Queens where Matt grew up: “Hey, that appliance business you have? That’s ours now. We’ll call when we need your signature on anything.
”
When Matt made the mistake of trying to tell her this, she became enraged:
“How can they do that? Those are your ideas! Don’t you have a patent on them? Can’t you sue them or something? And anyway, IBM is on your side!”
He got tired of walking her through the process of a lawsuit. Microsoft could drown them in legal motions, subpoenas, discovery requests, and on and on, before they ever got in front of a judge. No one could afford those legal fees and no one could wait all that time for a verdict, which Microsoft would appeal even if they lost, meanwhile stealing the market from you.
Matt tried another tack. Way back at the University when he’d had a summer internship at DataPoint, he’d explained to her what “fear, uncertainty, and doubt” meant when IBM did it. Microsoft was doing the same thing now, when they told the industry that they were going to support pen input, and everyone should wait rather than deal with GO. They had the power to freeze everyone in the industry.
Miriam had forgotten all that. She couldn’t or didn’t want to understand that it was just business. This was her chance to move to Portola Valley or buy a vintage house in Old Palo Alto, after all, and it was slipping away. The discussion subsided, but she was still seething.
* * *
With the crew at GO, Matt didn’t notice any changes. The execs were back from Tucson, and everyone knew the conference hadn’t gone well and Microsoft was stealing their ideas. The execs spent hours closeted away in meetings, looking earnest, and it was impossible to hide the fact that something was up. They would tell everyone the official story on Friday at the beer blast / comms meeting, but surely the real story would leak out before then.
Still, for now it was business as usual. It would have been career-limiting to utter a discouraging word about GO’s prospects. Everyone had faith in Jerry Kaplan and Robert Carr, and the Friday meeting would put it all into perspective.
There were rumors that they were getting off the Intel processor family entirely, which would be a radical shift for everyone in engineering. The Intel 8086, 80286, and 80386 chips were what people in the Valley lived and died with. Whenever you met someone from another company with any sort of computing device, “What’s the processor?” was always the first question.
The IBM PC and all its clones ran on Intel, of course, Microsoft owned DOS and now Windows, and it was basically a shared monopoly. Matt had always wondered why GO was ever on Intel in the first place. Surely Microsoft would squeeze them out, he’d always thought, and now it was coming to pass.
It was impossible to keep something like this a secret in a small company like GO. Pretty soon the word was out: the processor was going to be the Hobbit, from AT&T. Engineers feverishly gathered information about the Hobbit all week long, and analyzed its design vs. the ARM chip. It was like Computer Science grad school again for Matt. Arguing about chips and how well they ran particular languages and operating systems was raw meat for engineers. Nothing else could make a bunch of programmers geek out like that. The actual business reason for the switch was something they didn’t give as much thought to.
“ARM” meant Advanced RISC Machine, or Acorn RISC Machine, “RISC” meaning “reduced instruction set computer,” which was the new hotness in the computer industry. The Intel chips were “CISC” or “complex instruction set computer” meaning they had complicated instructions designed to make computer languages run fast, while RISC designers had a philosophy of “just make a few simple instructions blazing fast, and let the compiler guys deal with it.” ARM’s big selling point was that it used less power, so you could put it in a battery-operated device, i.e. something you carried around.
For Matt, there was a much more serious issue than “which chip is better?”: they were partnering with AT&T. He had a sick foreboding about this from his time at 3Com: AT&T was big, bureaucratic, and stupid. They would take forever to decide anything, and then make the wrong decision anyway. It was a former telephone monopoly and nothing would ever change those guys’ mindset. No one ever made money dealing with AT&T.
His conversations with Miriam kept getting worse. She’d start out interrogating him about how it was going, and recount what her boss Abigail at her clinic said about the PC business. This was starting to annoy him. “What the hell does that stupid shrink know?” he said to himself. Abigail had been hearing for years about how Bill Gates and the Beast From Redmond were stomping through the Valley and stealing everyone’s technology, and she really wanted someone to stand up to them for a change. GO had been Miriam’s big hope for getting rich, and now it was slipping away. Matt’s instinct was just to lay low for a while and see what happened. Maybe he’d bail out later. This left Miriam unsatisfied. How could he even consider walking away from all that effort?
It seemed like she was picking fights about other stuff more often, too. The remodeling job years ago that they’d fired Walt for, and finally hired someone else to finish was a continual source of complaint. The kitchen island that had triggered so much trouble for Walt was never quite good enough for her. She’d seen Abigail’s and it was so much better: bigger, with a better granite top. Even though Matt and Miriam’s house was nicer now, it was still in a just so-so neighborhood, and nothing would change that except moving.
He called up Dan Markunas, his old buddy from 3Com, who was now working at Oracle, just two exits down 101 from his exit. They met for lunch at Tokie’s, a sushi place roughly halfway between them, in Foster City.
Dan and Matt hadn’t seen each other in months, since they’d both left 3Com. They sat right near the sushi chef, who took their orders and started handing them the wonderful sushi Tokie’s was known for.
Matt said, “So how’s Oracle? Is it as bad as everyone says?”
“Hah! It just depends on what part of it you’re in. Our part is run by Porter Berwick, an old hippie from Xerox. I guess some parts of Oracle are sweatshops, but I really like it so far.”
“So what does your division do?”
“We’re called the Network Products Division. SQL*Net is the main product, which makes tons of money because all the customers buy it. Maybe that’s why Larry leaves us alone.”
Matt took all that in. They talked about what a network products division at Oracle would do. Apparently Porter had a vision that was about much more than SQL*Net, and they had a lot of networking talent. Deep knowledge of database technology was not a requirement for getting hired there, although at one time every secretary at Oracle knew how to do an outer join. Matt wasn’t sure what an “outer join” even was, but apparently it was some SQL thing. They laughed about Larry Ellison’s outsized reputation around the Valley, including the time he’d quoted Genghis Khan’s “It is not enough that I succeed. All others must fail.” That one had provoked a letter to the editor in the San Jose Mercury News about the example he was setting for children.
“Anyway, enough about me. What about you? How’s GO?” Dan asked, knowing that there was probably a good reason for this lunch.
“Well, not great,” said Matt. “You know what we’re doing there, right?”
“Some kind of handheld device with a stylus, and that’s about all I know,” said Dan. “Doesn’t it recognize your handwriting?”
“Sometimes it does. Anyhow, they showed it all to Microsoft some years ago before I got there…”
“Uh-oh,” interrupted Dan. “I know where this is going.”
Matt laughed. “Yeah. You and I saw it with LAN Manager. Now it’s happening here.”
“So, let me guess: Microsoft is announcing their own version of it, and everyone should wait until it’s ready?”
“Wow, you’re really good at this, Dan!”
Dan nodded his head, and continued, “So what’s GO going to do now? I know: claim this validates our vision for the future, and welcome Microsoft into this market that we pioneered?”
“Well, maybe that’s what we say in public.”
“But in private…?”
“In private, we’re getting off Intel and partnering with AT&T.”
Dan buried his face in his hands.
“Matt, Matt, Matt. No one makes money dealing with AT&T. No one. Didn’t you tell them that?”
“It’s above my pay grade, Dan. They don’t listen to me.”
Dan knew Matt was going to be looking around for another job soon. But he was still curious about one thing.
“So you said you’re ‘getting off Intel.’ What does that mean? Onto what?”
“Have you ever heard of the Hobbit processor?”
“No. Who makes that?”
“Who do you think?”
“Oh, God, no,” said Dan. “The plot sickens.”
“I mean, yeah. Getting off Intel makes a ton of sense. But everyone’s moving to the ARM instead.”
“Now that I’ve heard of, at least. What’s the deal with ARM?”
Matt said, “ARM is a low-power device that the Apple Newton is using, supposedly.”
“OK, yeah, right, I guess I did read that. So what’s wrong with using ARM?”
Matt shrugged. “Not AT&T’s choice, I guess.”
“Wow. Just wow.” Dan shook his head.
“Yep. Yep.”
“So what are you going to do?”
Matt said, “Well, just see how it shakes out, for a while anyway.”
“It only gets worse from here, Matt.”
“Miriam is pretty invested in us getting rich from GO. She keeps hassling me about it. I think it’s really her mother who’s doing the talking, but she goes ballistic if I say that.”
“What, she wants you to stay with it, or go somewhere else, or what?”
“She thinks GO should sue Microsoft and make a big stink about it.”
“Yeah, that always works well.”
“She’s been watching too many lawyer shows, I think.”
Dan was silent. He said, finally,
“Well, we’re hiring, so if you ever want…”
“I might take you up on that,” said Matt. “I don’t feel like going down with the ship here. But what would I be doing there?”
“I’m not sure, but you can come down and have lunch with Porter, so it’s not really an ‘interview’ “ he said, making the air quotes with his fingers.
Matt looked agreeable. Dan said he’d set it up.
===========================
There! That wasn’t so bad, was it? There’s a companion “Notes” doc where I detail what really happened back then, who helped me with it, and answer any other questions you might have.
Yes, there’s no free lunch: you can read this for free, but going deeper into the history will cost you a modest $5 a month. The Paid section will also include all the chapters, whereas they age out of the Free section after a few months. If you like what you read, buy the book.
There will usually be a Notes post on each chapter, where you read the real story if there is one.