| DOWN AND OUT IN SILICON VALLEY The High Cost of the High-Tech Dream Mel Krantzler Patricia Biondi Krantzler Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2002 |
Rating: 4.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-1-57392-926-? | ||||
| ISBN 1-57392-926-3 | 200pp. | HC | $? | |
| Page 17: | "Without the invention of the transistor, associated with William Schockley as its major creator in 1956, Silicon Valley would probably be called Silicon Gulch." |
| Uhhh, no. Try "Galena Gulch", in honor of the early "cat's-whisker" RF detectors. A more likely moniker would be one of: Cathode City, Filament Fields, Tungsten Territory, Vacuum-Tube Valley because those bulky, tungsten-filament devices in their glass envelopes would still be in wide use. |
| Page 20: | List of leading area companies. |
| Boy is this list dated! And Pacific Bell in software? No mention of the East Bay company Sybase, one of the big three PC database software companies? No mention of Sun? IBM? Seagate? Borland? |
| Page 24: | "He was Lee Jang Dae, chairman of Daewood Motor Company in South Korea, the equivalent in Asia of General Motors." |
| Spelling: S/B "Daewoo". |
| Page 24: | "So he, too, was another Silicon Valley icon with feet of clay." |
| Based on what? |
| Page 26: | For one article's headline reads..." |
| The authors use "For" too much at the beginning of sentences. |
| Page 31: | "When they came to Silicon Valley, the eighty-hour weeks didn't phase them." |
| Stunning! |
| Page 32: | "Here's the timeline..." |
| It's not a timeline. |
| Page 157: | (footnote) "Such agreements were, of course, very hard enforce." |
| Missing word: S/B "very hard to enforce". |
| Page 35: | "...Hansel and Gretel wandering blindly..." |
| Hansel and Gretel had marked the trail with bread crumbs. You remember. "Breadcrumbs" is now a software term of art. |
| Page 43: | "Now they want potential on the cheap."" |
| The closing quotation mark is doubled. |
| Page 46: | "The very same high-tech ITs..." |
| There's a mixture of verb tenses in this sentence. The repeated use of "IT" to mean "information technologist" is non-standard. And "high-tech ITs" is redundant. |
| Page 47: | "There was a time in the long dead days..." |
| Missing hyphen: S/B "long-dead". |
| Page 48: | "But if they would say that 'the future lies ahead,' they would be on safer ground than their fantasy forecasts." |
| Right. "Future events such as these will affect us in the future." – Criswell Predicts. (The typos and the tortured phrasing in this book make me want to take a thinly veiled swipe at the sacred cows entrenched in naval circles.) |
| Pages 50-51: | In a quote from T. H. Watkins: "There seems to be no reason why this Sara band of prosperity cannot continue..." |
| Extra space, incorrect capitalization: S/B "saraband". |
| Page 58: | "Many, if not most, people began to believe that the pursuit of happiness meant the pursuit of making a fortune." |
| Some did, but not most. |
| Page 58: | The words tycoon, magnate, mogul..." |
| Missing word: What about "plutocrat"? (cf Adventures in Paradise, starring the late Gardner McKay). |
| Page 59: | "You may perhaps have noticed we have said very little about the women in silicon Valley's high-tech industry. [...] We will be devoting all of chapter 4 to them." |
| I first read this as "We will be devoting a chapter to all 4 of them." Ha! Well, Heidi Roizen, Carol Bartz, Ann Winblad, Meg Whitman — none of whom are mentioned in Chapter 4. |
| Page 60: | "And the power they derive..." |
| Lord Acton misquoted. |
| Page 63: | "...a wonderful line in the great 1963 movie The Leopard..." |
| Which 1963 movie??? [ADDENDUM 2019]: This was laziness on my part. Foreign languages included, the IMDB lists 8 films with two-word titles where the second word is "Leopard" and the first is an article ("A" or "The"). Of these, only one dates from 1963, and it is at the top of the list. It is Il Gattopardo, directed by Luchino Visconti and starring Burt Lancaster, Alain Delon, and Claudia Cardinale. The IMDB entry describes it thus: "The Prince of Salina, a noble aristocrat of impeccable integrity, tries to preserve his family and class amid the tumultuous social upheavals of 1860s Sicily." |
| Page 64: | "It would be best to seek out the recollections of a person [...] He was journalist Jeff Goodell..." |
| What's more, he still is. |
| Page 66: | "The billionaire-flush high-tech companies..." |
| The authors just told us about Forbes magazine listing just 538 billionaires in all the world. |
| Page 67: | "Mora Gunn, a high-tech reporter..." |
| Would this be Moira Gunn of Tech Nation fame? |
| Page 67: | "A natural mobility study..." |
| Word choice: S/B "national". |
| Chapter 4: | Discusses Anne M. Mulcahy (Xerox), Janese Swanson (Broderbund), and Carly Florina. |
| Spelling: S/B "Carly Fiorina". And 18 pages of this 31-page chapter are devoted to Janese Swanson's own words. As noted, many of the leading ladies from Silicon Valley's heyday are not mentioned. |
| Page 149: | The flea with an erection. |
| WTF #2. [ADDENDUM 2019: Where is WTF #1?] |
| Page 153: | "No man is an island entire of itself... Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never seem to know for whome the bell tolls. It tolls for thee." |
| The well-known quote from John Donne misspells one word: S/B "seek". |
| Page 188: | "The novelist Alexander Kuprin once remarked, 'The horror is that there is no horror!' It's a profound statement." |
| Not when it's taken out of context. |
| Page 191: | "All that is solid melts into air." |
| Is this Shakespeare? The epigram is unattributed. |
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