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that you can build an initial marketplace mass-interest in them. There arenât enough people out there who know how to combine all the things youâve combined here. The system makes it hard to sell anything above the marginal cost of goods, unless you have a really innovative idea, which canât stay innovative for long, so you need continuous invention and re-invention too. You two fellows appear to be doing that. I donât know anything definitive about the aesthetic qualities of your gadgets, nor how useful theyâll be, but I do understand their distinctiveness, so thatâs why Iâm here.â
It was longer than all the speeches heâd delivered since arriving, put together. Suzanne nodded and made some notes. Perry looked him up and down.
âYouâre, what, an ex-B-school prof from Cornell, right?â
âYes, for a few years. And I ran a company for a while, doing import-export from emerging economy states in the former Soviet bloc.â
âI see,â Perry said. âSo youâre into what, a new company every 18 months or something?â
âOh no,â Tjan said, and he had a little twinkle in his eye and the tiniest hint of a smile. âOh no. Every six months. A year at the outside. Thatâs my deal. Iâm the business guy with the short attention span.â
âI see,â Perry said. âKettlewell didnât mention this.â
At the junkyard, Tjan wandered around the Elmo-propelled Smart car and peered at its innards, watched the Elmos negotiate their balance and position with minute movements and acoustic signals. âI wouldnât worry about it if I were you,â he said. âYou guys arenât temperamentally suited to doing just one thing.â
Lester laughed. âHeâs got you there, dude,â he said, slapping Perry on the shoulder.
Suzanne got Tjan out for dinner that night. âMy dad was in import-export and we travelled a lot, all over Asia and then the former Soviets. He sent me away when I was 16 to finish school in the States, and there was no question but that I would go to Stanford for business school.â
âNice to meet a fellow Californian,â she said, and sipped her wine. Theyâd gone to one of the famed Miami deco restaurants and the fish in front of her was practically a sculpture, so thoroughly plated it was.
âWell, Iâm as Californian as...â
â...as possible, under the circumstances,â she said and laughed. âItâs a Canadian joke, but it applies equally well to Californians. So you were in B-school when?â
âNinety eight to 2001. Interesting times to be in the Valley. I read your column, you know.â
She looked down at her plate. A lot of people had read the column back then. Women columnists were rare in tech, and she supposed she was good at it, too. âI hope I get remembered as more than the chronicler of the dot-com boom, though,â she said.
âOh, you will,â he said. âYouâll be remembered as the chronicler of thisâwhat Kettlewell and Perry and Lester are doing.â
âWhat youâre doing, too, right?â
âOh, yes, what Iâm doing too.â
A robot rollerbladed past on the boardwalk, turning the occasional somersault. âI should have them build some of those,â Tjan said, watching the crowd turn to regard it. It hopped onto and off of the curb, expertly steered around the wandering couples and the occasional homeless person. It had a banner it streamed out behind it: CAPâN JACKS PAINTBALL AND FANBOAT TOURS GET SHOT AND GET WET MIAMI KEY WEST LAUDERDALE.
âYou think they can?â
âSure,â Tjan said. âThose two can build anything. Thatâs the point: any moderately skilled practitioner can build anything these days, for practically nothing. Back in the old days, the blacksmith just made every bit of ironmongery everyone needed, one piece at a time, at his forge. Thatâs where weâre at. Every industry that required a factory yesterday only needs a garage today. Itâs a real return to fundamentals. What no one ever could do was join up all the smithies and all the smiths and make them into a single logical network with a single set of objectives. Thatâs new and itâs what I plan on making hay out of. This will be much bigger than dot-com. It will be much harder, tooâbigger crests, deeper troughs. This is something to chronicle all right: it will make dot-com look like a warm up for the main show.
âWeâre going to create a new class of artisans who can change careers every 10 months, inventing new jobs that hadnât been imagined a year before.â
âThatâs a pretty unstable market,â Suzanne said, and ate some fish.
âThatâs a functional market. Hereâs what I think the point of a good market is. In a good market, you invent something and you charge all the market will bear for it. Someone else figures out how to do it cheaper, or decides they can do it for a slimmer marginânot the same thing, you know, in the first case someone is more efficient and in the second theyâre just less greedy or less ambitious. They do it and so you have to drop your prices to compete. Then someone comes along whoâs less greedy or more efficient than both of you and undercuts you again, and again, and again, until eventually you get down to a kind of firmament, a baseline that you canât go lower than, the cheapest you can produce a good and stay in business. Thatâs why straightpins, machine screws and reams of paper all cost basically nothing, and make damned little profit for their manufacturers.
âSo if you want to make a big profit, youâve got to start over again, invent something new, and milk it for all you can before the first imitator shows up. The more this happens, the cheaper and better everything gets. Itâs how we got here, you see. Itâs what the system is for. Weâre approaching a kind of pure and perfect state now, with competition and invention getting easier and easierâitâs producing a kind of superabundance thatâs amazing to watch. My kids just surf it, make themselves over every six months, learn a new interface, a new entertainment, you name it. Change-surfers...â He trailed off.
âYou have kids?â
âIn St Petersburg, with their mother.â
She could tell by his tone that it had been the wrong question to ask. He was looking hangdog. âWell, it must be nice to be so much closer to them than you were in Ithaca.â
âWhat? No, no. The St Petersburg in Russia.â
âOh,â she said.
They concentrated on their food for a while.
âYou know,â he said, after theyâd ordered coffee and desert, âitâs all about abundance. I want my kids to grow up with abundance, and whatever is going on right now, itâs providing abundance in abundance. The self-storage industry is bigger than the recording industry, did you know that? All they do is provide a place to put stuff that we own that we canât find room forâthatâs superabundance.â
âI have a locker in Milpitas,â she said.
âThere you go. Itâs a growth industry.â He drank his coffee. On the way back to their cars, he said, âMy daughter, Lyenitchka, is four, and my son, Sasha, is one. I havenât lived with their mother in three years.â He made a face. âSashaâs circumstances were complicated. Theyâre good kids, though. It just couldnât work with their mother. Sheâs Russian, and connectedâthatâs how we met, I was hustling for my import-export business and she had some good connectionsâso after the divorce there was no question of my taking the kids with me. But theyâre good kids.â
âDo you see them?â
âWe videoconference. Who knew that long-distance divorce was the killer app for videoconferencing?â
âYeah.â
That week, Suzanne tweeted constantly, filed two columns, and blogged ten or more items a day: photos, bits of discussion between Lester, Perry and Tjan, a couple videos of the Boogie Woogie Elmos doing improbable things. Turned out that there was quite a cult following for the BWE, and the news that there was a trove of some thousands of them in a Hollywood dump sent a half-dozen pilgrims winging their way across the nation to score some for the collectorsâ market. Perry wouldnât even take their money: âFella,â he told one persistent dealer, âI got forty thousand of these things. I wonât miss a couple dozen. Just call it good karma.â
When Tjan found out about it he pursed his lips for a moment, then said, âLet me know if someone wants to pay us money, please. I think you were right, but Iâd like to have a say, all right?â
Perry looked at Suzanne, who was videoing this exchange with her keychain. Then he looked back at Tjan, âYeah, of course. Sorryâforce of habit. No harm done, though, right?â
That footage got downloaded a couple hundred times that night, but once it got slashdotted by a couple of high-profile headline aggregators, she found her server hammered with a hundred thousand requests. The Merc had the horsepower to serve them all, but you never knew: every once in a while, the web hit another tipping point and grew by an order of magnitude or so, and then all the server-provisioningâcalculated to survive the old slashdottingsâshredded like wet kleenex.
From: kettlewell-l@skunkworks.kodacell.com
To: schurch@sjmercury.com
Subject: Re: Embedded journalist?
This stuff is amazing. Amazing! Christ, I should put you on the payroll. Forget I wrote that. But i should. Youâve got a fantastic eye. I have never felt as in touch with my own business as I do at this moment. Not to mention proud! Proudâyouâve made me so proud of the work these guys are doing, proud to have some role in it.
Kettlebelly
She read it sitting up in her coffin, just one of several hundred emails from that dayâs blog-posts and column. She laughed and dropped it in her folder of correspondence to answer. It was nearly midnight, too late to get into it with Kettlewell.
Then her computer rangâthe net-phone she forwarded her cellphone to when her computer was live and connected. Sheâd started doing that a couple years back, when soft-phones really stabilized, and her phone bills had dropped to less than twenty bucks a month, down from several hundred. It wasnât that she spent a lot of time within armâs reach of a live computer, but given that calls routed through the laptop were free, she was perfectly willing to defer her calls until she was.
âHi Jimmy,â she saidâher editor, back in San Jose. 9PM Pacific time on a weeknight was still working hours for him.
âSuzanne,â he said.
She waited. Sheâd half expected him to call with a little shower of praise, an echo of Kettlewellâs note. Jimmy wasnât the most effusive editor sheâd had, but it made his little moments of praise more valuable for their rarity.
âSuzanne,â he said again.
âJimmy,â she said. âItâs late here. Whatâs up?â
âSo, itâs like this. I love your reports but itâs not Silicon Valley news. Itâs Miami news. McClatchy handed me a thirty percent cut this morning and Iâm going to the bone. I am firing a third of the newsroom today. Now, you are a stupendous writer and so I said to myself, âI can fire her or I can bring her home and have her write about Silicon Valley again,â and I knew what the answer had to be. So I need you to come home, just wrap it up and come home.â
He finished speaking and she found herself staring at her computerâs screen. Her hands were gripping the laptopâs edges so tightly it hurt, and the machine made a plasticky squeak as it
It was longer than all the speeches heâd delivered since arriving, put together. Suzanne nodded and made some notes. Perry looked him up and down.
âYouâre, what, an ex-B-school prof from Cornell, right?â
âYes, for a few years. And I ran a company for a while, doing import-export from emerging economy states in the former Soviet bloc.â
âI see,â Perry said. âSo youâre into what, a new company every 18 months or something?â
âOh no,â Tjan said, and he had a little twinkle in his eye and the tiniest hint of a smile. âOh no. Every six months. A year at the outside. Thatâs my deal. Iâm the business guy with the short attention span.â
âI see,â Perry said. âKettlewell didnât mention this.â
At the junkyard, Tjan wandered around the Elmo-propelled Smart car and peered at its innards, watched the Elmos negotiate their balance and position with minute movements and acoustic signals. âI wouldnât worry about it if I were you,â he said. âYou guys arenât temperamentally suited to doing just one thing.â
Lester laughed. âHeâs got you there, dude,â he said, slapping Perry on the shoulder.
Suzanne got Tjan out for dinner that night. âMy dad was in import-export and we travelled a lot, all over Asia and then the former Soviets. He sent me away when I was 16 to finish school in the States, and there was no question but that I would go to Stanford for business school.â
âNice to meet a fellow Californian,â she said, and sipped her wine. Theyâd gone to one of the famed Miami deco restaurants and the fish in front of her was practically a sculpture, so thoroughly plated it was.
âWell, Iâm as Californian as...â
â...as possible, under the circumstances,â she said and laughed. âItâs a Canadian joke, but it applies equally well to Californians. So you were in B-school when?â
âNinety eight to 2001. Interesting times to be in the Valley. I read your column, you know.â
She looked down at her plate. A lot of people had read the column back then. Women columnists were rare in tech, and she supposed she was good at it, too. âI hope I get remembered as more than the chronicler of the dot-com boom, though,â she said.
âOh, you will,â he said. âYouâll be remembered as the chronicler of thisâwhat Kettlewell and Perry and Lester are doing.â
âWhat youâre doing, too, right?â
âOh, yes, what Iâm doing too.â
A robot rollerbladed past on the boardwalk, turning the occasional somersault. âI should have them build some of those,â Tjan said, watching the crowd turn to regard it. It hopped onto and off of the curb, expertly steered around the wandering couples and the occasional homeless person. It had a banner it streamed out behind it: CAPâN JACKS PAINTBALL AND FANBOAT TOURS GET SHOT AND GET WET MIAMI KEY WEST LAUDERDALE.
âYou think they can?â
âSure,â Tjan said. âThose two can build anything. Thatâs the point: any moderately skilled practitioner can build anything these days, for practically nothing. Back in the old days, the blacksmith just made every bit of ironmongery everyone needed, one piece at a time, at his forge. Thatâs where weâre at. Every industry that required a factory yesterday only needs a garage today. Itâs a real return to fundamentals. What no one ever could do was join up all the smithies and all the smiths and make them into a single logical network with a single set of objectives. Thatâs new and itâs what I plan on making hay out of. This will be much bigger than dot-com. It will be much harder, tooâbigger crests, deeper troughs. This is something to chronicle all right: it will make dot-com look like a warm up for the main show.
âWeâre going to create a new class of artisans who can change careers every 10 months, inventing new jobs that hadnât been imagined a year before.â
âThatâs a pretty unstable market,â Suzanne said, and ate some fish.
âThatâs a functional market. Hereâs what I think the point of a good market is. In a good market, you invent something and you charge all the market will bear for it. Someone else figures out how to do it cheaper, or decides they can do it for a slimmer marginânot the same thing, you know, in the first case someone is more efficient and in the second theyâre just less greedy or less ambitious. They do it and so you have to drop your prices to compete. Then someone comes along whoâs less greedy or more efficient than both of you and undercuts you again, and again, and again, until eventually you get down to a kind of firmament, a baseline that you canât go lower than, the cheapest you can produce a good and stay in business. Thatâs why straightpins, machine screws and reams of paper all cost basically nothing, and make damned little profit for their manufacturers.
âSo if you want to make a big profit, youâve got to start over again, invent something new, and milk it for all you can before the first imitator shows up. The more this happens, the cheaper and better everything gets. Itâs how we got here, you see. Itâs what the system is for. Weâre approaching a kind of pure and perfect state now, with competition and invention getting easier and easierâitâs producing a kind of superabundance thatâs amazing to watch. My kids just surf it, make themselves over every six months, learn a new interface, a new entertainment, you name it. Change-surfers...â He trailed off.
âYou have kids?â
âIn St Petersburg, with their mother.â
She could tell by his tone that it had been the wrong question to ask. He was looking hangdog. âWell, it must be nice to be so much closer to them than you were in Ithaca.â
âWhat? No, no. The St Petersburg in Russia.â
âOh,â she said.
They concentrated on their food for a while.
âYou know,â he said, after theyâd ordered coffee and desert, âitâs all about abundance. I want my kids to grow up with abundance, and whatever is going on right now, itâs providing abundance in abundance. The self-storage industry is bigger than the recording industry, did you know that? All they do is provide a place to put stuff that we own that we canât find room forâthatâs superabundance.â
âI have a locker in Milpitas,â she said.
âThere you go. Itâs a growth industry.â He drank his coffee. On the way back to their cars, he said, âMy daughter, Lyenitchka, is four, and my son, Sasha, is one. I havenât lived with their mother in three years.â He made a face. âSashaâs circumstances were complicated. Theyâre good kids, though. It just couldnât work with their mother. Sheâs Russian, and connectedâthatâs how we met, I was hustling for my import-export business and she had some good connectionsâso after the divorce there was no question of my taking the kids with me. But theyâre good kids.â
âDo you see them?â
âWe videoconference. Who knew that long-distance divorce was the killer app for videoconferencing?â
âYeah.â
That week, Suzanne tweeted constantly, filed two columns, and blogged ten or more items a day: photos, bits of discussion between Lester, Perry and Tjan, a couple videos of the Boogie Woogie Elmos doing improbable things. Turned out that there was quite a cult following for the BWE, and the news that there was a trove of some thousands of them in a Hollywood dump sent a half-dozen pilgrims winging their way across the nation to score some for the collectorsâ market. Perry wouldnât even take their money: âFella,â he told one persistent dealer, âI got forty thousand of these things. I wonât miss a couple dozen. Just call it good karma.â
When Tjan found out about it he pursed his lips for a moment, then said, âLet me know if someone wants to pay us money, please. I think you were right, but Iâd like to have a say, all right?â
Perry looked at Suzanne, who was videoing this exchange with her keychain. Then he looked back at Tjan, âYeah, of course. Sorryâforce of habit. No harm done, though, right?â
That footage got downloaded a couple hundred times that night, but once it got slashdotted by a couple of high-profile headline aggregators, she found her server hammered with a hundred thousand requests. The Merc had the horsepower to serve them all, but you never knew: every once in a while, the web hit another tipping point and grew by an order of magnitude or so, and then all the server-provisioningâcalculated to survive the old slashdottingsâshredded like wet kleenex.
From: kettlewell-l@skunkworks.kodacell.com
To: schurch@sjmercury.com
Subject: Re: Embedded journalist?
This stuff is amazing. Amazing! Christ, I should put you on the payroll. Forget I wrote that. But i should. Youâve got a fantastic eye. I have never felt as in touch with my own business as I do at this moment. Not to mention proud! Proudâyouâve made me so proud of the work these guys are doing, proud to have some role in it.
Kettlebelly
She read it sitting up in her coffin, just one of several hundred emails from that dayâs blog-posts and column. She laughed and dropped it in her folder of correspondence to answer. It was nearly midnight, too late to get into it with Kettlewell.
Then her computer rangâthe net-phone she forwarded her cellphone to when her computer was live and connected. Sheâd started doing that a couple years back, when soft-phones really stabilized, and her phone bills had dropped to less than twenty bucks a month, down from several hundred. It wasnât that she spent a lot of time within armâs reach of a live computer, but given that calls routed through the laptop were free, she was perfectly willing to defer her calls until she was.
âHi Jimmy,â she saidâher editor, back in San Jose. 9PM Pacific time on a weeknight was still working hours for him.
âSuzanne,â he said.
She waited. Sheâd half expected him to call with a little shower of praise, an echo of Kettlewellâs note. Jimmy wasnât the most effusive editor sheâd had, but it made his little moments of praise more valuable for their rarity.
âSuzanne,â he said again.
âJimmy,â she said. âItâs late here. Whatâs up?â
âSo, itâs like this. I love your reports but itâs not Silicon Valley news. Itâs Miami news. McClatchy handed me a thirty percent cut this morning and Iâm going to the bone. I am firing a third of the newsroom today. Now, you are a stupendous writer and so I said to myself, âI can fire her or I can bring her home and have her write about Silicon Valley again,â and I knew what the answer had to be. So I need you to come home, just wrap it up and come home.â
He finished speaking and she found herself staring at her computerâs screen. Her hands were gripping the laptopâs edges so tightly it hurt, and the machine made a plasticky squeak as it
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