The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story (23 page)

The lawyers for the Department of Justice were glum. They were doing their best to persuade the judge that Microsoft had muscled Netscape around. If Clark had invited Microsoft into his business back in December 1994, how could the DOJ now claim that Microsoft had forced its charms upon Netscape in June 1995? The DOJ’s lawyers were still angry at Clark. He hadn’t told them about his overture to Microsoft; the department’s lawyers had learned about it only when the e-mail was produced by Microsoft in pretrial evidence.

Finally, there was Barksdale’s reaction to Clark’s astonishing e-mail, which amounted to an offer to serve as a kind of Trojan horse for Microsoft’s invasion of the Internet. Clark had talked Barksdale into leaving his job with AT&T. Barksdale had agreed to run Netscape on the condition that he have complete control. Clark and John Doerr had both agreed not to meddle. And now this! Clark’s e-mail inviting Microsoft to sit in on his business was written
five days
before Barksdale reported for work. And the only reason Barksdale knew about it now was that the Department of Justice lawyers had warned him it was coming before he took the stand.

Forewarned, Barksdale sought to maintain that Clark’s e-mail had been written in “a moment of weakness.” The Microsoft lawyer, of course, hoped to persuade the judge that the e-mail was not the act of a man fighting his demons at three in the morning but a deliberate corporate policy. He wanted to force Barksdale to concede that he and Clark were part of a unified team and that, therefore, Barksdale must have known of the e-mail. Once he had Barksdale under oath, he offered him a terrible choice. Barksdale could agree that he, like Jim Clark, had been happy to invite Microsoft into Netscape’s business, and thus torpedo the government’s entire case. Or he could seem like a fool who was not privy to the intimate affairs of his own company.

“Mr. Barksdale,” the Microsoft lawyer boomed.
Barksday-ul
. Barksdale looked up.

“Is Mr. Clark a highly secretive man?” asked the lawyer.

“He can be very secretive, yes sir,” replied Barksdale.

“Mr. Clark has had a very successful business career, has he not?” asked the lawyer.

“Yes, he has,” replied Barksdale.

“And does he enjoy a public reputation for veracity?” asked the lawyer.

“I couldn’t comment on that,” replied Barksdale. “I don’t know.”

“Do you regard him as a truthful man?” It took him so long to ask the question that a swarm of mosquitos could have hatched in his mouth. “Truthful” emerged from his fat throat as
tru-u-u-uth…fullll
. “Man” became
mayan
. Even “Clark” became two syllables.
Clar-ark
.

Nevertheless, Barksdale needed time to think. Had it been a movie instead of real life, he would have flashed back to the preceding three years. Right from the moment he left the secure womb of Serious American Business and entered ClarkWorld, Barksdale’s life had become a constant struggle to preserve his dignity. At dinner parties Barksdale told a funny story about his first trip down to Silicon Valley, when he and his wife met up with a realtor Clark had put him on to, with the assurance that she was the best in the business.

Clark’s real estate agent turned out to be one of those loud, garrulous people who, as they drive, insist on making eye contact with the passengers in the back seat. “You want to see Scott Cook’s house?” she hollered over her shoulder to a terrified Mr. and Mrs. Jim Barksdale. Scott Cook was the chairman of Intuit, the financial software company. “Is it for sale?” asked Barksdale. “No,” said the woman. “Then I don’t want to see it,” said Barksdale. Clark’s realtor ignored him and squealed through this enormous bronze gate and into Scott Cook’s driveway. Out of the house shot Mrs. Scott Cook to investigate this intrusion. Clark’s realtor had panicked, backed up and tried to make a quick getaway but ended up rolling back into Mrs. Cook’s newly planted garden. There she became stuck in the mud. Wheels spun, plants flew. Mrs. Cook was livid. She looked at Barksdale as if he were some kind of criminal. They had to call a fire truck and a tow truck to extract him, his wife, and Clark’s realtor from the garden. The episode lasted an hour.

At the time it appeared to be a freak incident. In retrospect, it was the keynote for Barksdale’s career in ClarkWorld. Clark had treated him as gently as Clark was capable of treating any captain, but that was still more roughly than Barksdale had ever been treated. The IPO had been an excellent case in point. Barksdale had wanted Netscape to remain a private company. He liked the old-fashioned method of waiting until a company was profitable before taking on public shareholders. But just a few months after Barksdale joined the company Clark showed up for a board meeting with Frank Quattrone and Larry Sonsini in tow. Quattrone and Sonsini were, respectively, the leading investment banker and the leading lawyer in Silicon Valley. During the meeting Clark, who was of course eager to get the money to pay for his boat, turned to them and asked what they thought about taking Netscape public. Lawyers and investment bankers make their fortunes when companies go public. Both men joined Clark in pushing Barksdale to do the deed. All so that Jim Clark could pay for his boat!

You might have thought Clark would have been well satisfied to get his money. You might have thought he’d move on. Not a bit! Clark was forever hounding Barksdale to follow Yahoo and Excite into the portal business. “Portal,” like “browser,” was another coinage of the Internet. On the heels of Netscape several people at once had the bright idea of creating a sort of doorway, or portal, into the new virtual world. The browser enabled the user to travel around the Internet, but how would he know where to go? The information on the Internet cried out to be organized, and the portal companies responded to the cry. Clark kept telling Barksdale that the future was not in selling browser but in attracting the masses to Netscape’s own rather lackluster portal. Worse, he was right! On technical matters Barksdale was at the mercy of Marc Andreessen, the young man who had first shown Clark an Internet browser and helped him create Netscape. Andreessen had stayed on as Netscape’s technical authority, but he had threatened to quit half a dozen times, and threatened to sell all his Netscape shares more often than that. Imagine what the financial press would have done with that! As it was, Andreessen had unloaded a quarter of his stake near the low, at sixteen dollars a share. Jim Barksdale, Serious American Executive, was no longer a leader of men. He was a baby-sitter.

On top of it all there was this trial. It might as well have been Clark’s doing. Once it became inevitable that Netscape would be the centerpiece of the DOJ’s complaint against Microsoft, Barksdale took charge of the matter, of course. That was his job—to lend order and reason to other people’s anarchies. But the whole reason Clark had called Gary Reback, and had him write the letter to the Justice Department, was his fear that Barksdale would never have done anything. And he was probably right.

As Barksdale sat unhappily in the witness box he considered the question. Did he regard Jim Clark as a truthful man? Already he had sworn that he had never seen Clark’s e-mail. This might be strictly true—after all, Barksdale hadn’t figured out how to read his own e-mail—but his profession of ignorance did not begin to capture the spirit of that moment. The DOJ had shown Netscape’s counsel Roberta Katz a copy of Clark’s e-mail, and Katz had helped Barksdale prepare for his cross-examination. They both knew that he would be shown Clark’s e-mail, and asked to explain it. Barksdale’s show of ignorance was for effect: if he didn’t know about it, then it must not be terribly important. But the truth was he was shocked. He’d been hired to confer a certain dignity on Clark’s new enterprise, and the e-mail stripped him of that. The e-mail made him seem like the hired help, who had been told only as much as he needed to know.

“Do you regard Jim Clark as a truthful man?” the lawyer had asked.

“I regard him as a salesman,” replied Barksdale.

“I’m not going to touch that, Mr. Barksdale,” said the Microsoft lawyer, and moved on to less interesting matters.

T
o spend any time at all with Clark you had to foreswear the usual conveniences that come with planning ahead: advance-purchase airline tickets, hotel reservations, clean underwear. Clark’s friends learned to take it in stride when the call came from Jim—always from a cell phone, usually a thousand miles or so from where they expected him to be at that moment—that began, “Hey, um, I just wanted to let you know that, um, there’s been a change of plans. I won’t be meeting you in Nairobi this afternoon.” Clark’s wife Nancy Rutter had long ago figured out that any plans he made were not plans at all. A plan was merely a theory of how he might spend his day; at all times it clashed in his mind with half a dozen other theories.

It came as no surprise to anyone who knew Clark—and it certainly did not surprise his new crew—that before he crossed the Atlantic Ocean on his new computerized yacht he first had to change his mind seven or eight times about whether to do it. First he said that he would not miss the crossing for the world. Then he said that he might have to miss it to give a speech to some students at Stanford University. Then he saw that he could cancel the speech to make the crossing, and became more excited than ever about sailing across the ocean. Once he set the date of departure, he said the boat could not leave, because on that day the curtains in the boat’s living room were not exactly the way he wanted them to be. On and on he went. He was a man with a daisy, playing “She loves me, she loves me not,” except that he was doing it with his entire life.

Finally, at four o’ clock one morning in January 1999, or three months after Healtheon canceled its IPO, we boarded Clark’s plane in Palm Beach, Florida, and flew to the Canary Islands: I, Clark, and
Hyperion
’s chef, Tina Braddock, whom Clark had decided to take with him wherever he went. The rest of its crew and the software engineer Steve Hague were already on board. (Lance and Tim had been sent back to the room on top of the Jenny Craig weight loss center in Menlo Park, California.)
Hyperion
had just passed Spain on its way to a dock in Grand Canary, where it planned to collect us the next day. Clark’s jet was fired up and ready to go. His luggage compartment was crammed with food and wine for the crossing. After seven years of writing software that could sail a boat, Clark, at last, had the chance to watch his program guide his boat across an ocean. Even so, no one on his jet could predict what would happen next. When Clark went off to fiddle with something in the back of his plane, Tina leaned across the aisle and said, nervously, “I wonder if we’re really going to go.”

She knew! Somewhere was a reason for not sailing across the Atlantic Ocean on
Hyperion
’s maiden voyage. She also knew that she would have to wait to find out what that might be.

By the time we arrived on Grand Canary, the crowd of islanders had already gathered. It was an ugly dock, in an industrial area, half a mile from any place to which a sane human being would voluntarily venture. Yet all that night the people came and gawked. At midnight islanders streamed down the dock on foot, or puttered out in shambolic old cars, stopped, and peered into the boat. By midnight there was not much to see: a few people milling around; Steve and Jim down below plinking commands into their computers; and Allan Prior perched in his captain’s chair, wearing the same outfit he’d worn the past three days, staring, for reasons that would soon become clear, into the computer screen.

A
few hours after we arrived, Allan took his position at the helm, behind the row of computer screens, punched a few buttons, and sailed
Hyperion
into the Atlantic Ocean.

As we pushed away from the Canary Island dock and headed out to sea, the crew and the passengers gathered around the captain and took one long, last look. From the guest cabins came Steve and Clark and Louie Psihoyos, the photographer Clark had hired to document the crossing. From the kitchen came Tina and her steward, Peter, and his assistant, Kristi; from the deck came the first mate, Jaime, and the two deckhands, Simon Hutchins and the curiously named Celcelia. The sun beamed and the sea stretched out calmly as if the Atlantic were inviting us to cross. Just when it seemed that everyone was present and basking in the pride of departure, the kitchen floor opened up and a man climbed out of a hole. He looked as if he had not seen sunlight for a century. He was the engineer, Robert.

That is how eleven of the twelve people on board began crossing the Atlantic Ocean—with a sense of adventure. For most people who do it there is some romance in sailing across the Atlantic Ocean. Columbus, no less, had left from the Canary Islands and sailed for three months to the Caribbean. We would follow Columbus’s route, though we’d need only ten days to make the same trip. Imagine! The rest of us did; only Clark didn’t, or wouldn’t, or couldn’t imagine. He was not one of those people who can be sustained for long by other people’s fictions. He required his own. He saw the romance in the journey, or at any rate he saw that there
should
be romance in it. Certainly, the idea of it appealed to him. If it hadn’t, he wouldn’t have hired a photographer to come along to document it. But it soon became clear why he’d been so reluctant to come. The reality of the thing would nearly kill him.

The reality of crossing the Atlantic on a sailboat is that it is tedious. Very, very tedious. At least when it goes well it is tedious. When it goes badly it is treacherous. Not long after we departed, Robert, the engineer, gave me and Louie, who, it was clear to all, had to be watched like a couple of morons, a tour of the stuff that was used only when things went wrong: the life rafts, the fancy life jackets with special whistles and flares, the man-overboard system, the fire alarms. Robert tapped the side of the canister of gas hanging from a wall and used, apparently, to put out fires. (“The chances that you’ll be firing the gases are very remote,” he said. “But if everyone else on board is dead, you know, have a go.”) So far as I could tell there were several ways to die while crossing an ocean on a sailboat; if there weren’t, it wouldn’t be an adventure. One was to be run over by a tanker so large that it didn’t even realize it had hit you. The second was to be swept up in a storm that caused the mast to snap or the boat to capsize. A third was to fall overboard. The fourth, and most likely, was to die of boredom.

Clark was concerned only with the fourth. For him the crossing was a study in absences: no change, no diversion, no stimulation, no new place to go. He seemed to know at the outset that there are only so many times you can find Orion’s belt, or scan the horizon for whales and porpoises that fail to materialize, or remind yourself that an ocean crossing is meant to be the thrill of a lifetime before you begin to doubt the whole enterprise. The average man would require perhaps three days to discover his inner mutineer. It took Clark a bit under three hours. Exactly two hours and forty minutes into the ten-day trip, he turned to me and said, “I don’t know why the fuck I came on this. It’s going to be boring as hell.” He then walked over to Allan, who struck the pose of the captain at the helm, and gave an order to relay to the computers, which amounted to: “Get across this ocean in a straight line, as fast as you possibly can.”

Then he went down below into the living room and moped. On a boat the living room is for some reason called the “salon.” Clark sank into one of the deep upholstered chairs in his salon and surveyed his creation. A Monet landscape hung on the wall over his head, and a Picasso portrait from his Blue Period hung on the wall eight feet across from him—when he set out to make enough money to build his boat, he’d overshot a bit. Here was the moment in the Hollywood movie where the script would direct him to wave his hand over his brand-new, $37 million boat decorated with another $30 million in paintings and say what an amazing thing it was that a poor boy from Plainview, Texas, could sail off into the sunset in such a machine, bought and paid for with money he’d made inside of eighteen months. Instead, his mouth squinched up into its terrifying pucker of irritation. You could see that his mind had got hold of some object it disapproved of and was working itself into a tizzy. Finally, he said, “They should have extended the woodwork around the portholes.”

The crew looked up to see what was wrong with the portholes. They were rimmed by white painted aluminum rather than the dark teak and mahogany of the rest of the interior. They seemed fine to me, more than fine, and obviously they had seemed fine to the fifty or so Dutch master woodworkers who had created the interior. But here we were, at sea at last, and all Clark could think about was how they might have been better. The man chose his own path to madness, and it was the path not of the pessimist but of the utopian. He was on an endless search for some unattainable solution. The perfect world. The moment he suspected that he had created that perfect world, however, he found something in it that needed to be changed.

For the other eleven people on board the trip began calmly enough. Those who had business went about it. Celcelia and Jaime and Simon swabbed the decks and tested the sails. Steve hunched over his computer for hours on end until his posture called to mind Ichabod Crane with a backache. Clark, once he became tired of finding things that were wrong with his new boat, vanished into his cabin to find things that were wrong with his computer code. For the first few days he appeared only to eat, to drink, or to consult with Steve about some intractable bug. The seas were neither calm nor rough. There were no tankers or, for that matter, ships of any sort on the horizon. The only voice on the radio was static, punctuated by the occasional squawking from Filipino deckhands on the supertankers we could not see. “Filipino monkey! Filipino monkey!” they’d holler hysterically at each other for some reason no one could explain. Then they burst into mad howls. They sounded like people who rammed sailboats for kicks.

For the first few days we lived in a changeless world. Our biggest challenge, at least at the outset, was to avoid getting on each other’s nerves. The challenge was heightened by a strangely powerful form of sleep deprivation, known as the “watch.” Other than Clark everyone on board was required to sit two four-hour watches to ensure that we were not plowed under by the Filipino monkeys. Allan Prior posted the watch schedule just before we left. It looked like this:

The person listed first on each shift was officially designated “captain of the watch.” Our watch had four people on it because it included the two people—me and Louie, the photographer—who had no business on the boat. The captain had assumed that two idiots added up to one useful person. Actually, they didn’t even add up to that, as we discovered one evening when Robert was below inspecting the engine room. Struck by an intensely painful bowel movement, Simon hopped around the deck on one foot for twenty minutes straight rather than entrust Louie and me with the job of spotting supertankers before they crushed us.

The watch schedule repeated itself each twelve hours. In the grand scheme of human suffering a four-hour watch does not sound like much. Until you have gazed into perfect, unchanging blankness for four hours straight, you might even think it soothing. Coupled with the churning of the sea and the creaking of the boat, it was deadly. The sea transformed the boat’s beds into souped-up, turbo-charged versions of the coin-operated vibrating beds in a 1970 Holiday Inn. The new Dutch woodwork crackled like strings of miniature firecrackers. All in all, bedtime on
Hyperion
was more an idea than a fact. This was true not merely for the landlubbers but for everyone on board. Before long, eyes were rheumy, nerves frayed, and the feelings that are normally well sealed inside people’s hearts began to leak—then gush—out.

F
or the first few days Captain Allan Prior either sat at the wheel or hovered covetously over the computer with an intensity that surprised me, given how often he disavowed any interest in the thing. Once every half hour or so something minor went wrong, or the computer believed it went wrong, and an alarm sounded. “Beep-beep-beep,” it went, as Clark had not yet had time to write the code that enabled the computer to shout at the crew. Whenever the alarm made its irritating noise, another crew member shouted out “Robert! Alarm!” and Robert, the stout young engineer, would pop out through some hatch in the floor, wander over, punch a button or two on the computer, and the annoying beep-beep-beep ceased. On the surface, at least, all seemed well.

All was not well—though, apart from Clark’s obvious discontent, the signs of this were subtle. On the first night Louie’s cabin overheated, all by itself. Louie emerged for our 4:00
A.M.
watch with trickles of sweat running down the sides of his face. He asked, quite reasonably, “Why’s it so fucking hot in my cabin?” It turned out that it was hot because the computer decided it should be hot. It took about two hours of punching buttons on the computers to persuade it to lower the temperature, only to have the computer decide, seemingly by edict, to raise it again. On the second night, as Steve slept in the cabin he and I shared, someone mistakenly activated the flat-panel display screen tucked inside the ceiling. Our cabin, for some reason I never understood, had one computer screen in a drawer by the bed and another hidden up in the ceiling. At two in the morning the ceiling over Steve’s head opened with an eerie hum, and a green glowing screen dropped down from a new hole, like a UFO. It had scared the hell out of him, as it would have out of anyone.

Obviously, these were mere ripples in the pond. Changes in technology are not simple matters. Often they change the way people interact with their surroundings, and with each other. Invent the automobile, and people will travel more often; invent air-conditioning, and they’ll travel south.
Hyperion
offered a neat little illustration of the early stages of technically inspired social chaos. There is, or was, until Jim Clark got ahold of it, probably no space in the Western world outside of a church more highly ritualized than a sailboat. It has its own peculiar vocabulary designed to mystify outsiders. Lee, jib, splice tang, furl, gimbal—not one in ten intelligent landlubbers could define half of them. There are customs and traditions on a sailboat. There is a carefully observed pecking order. The captain lords it over the first mate, the first mate lords it over the deckhands, the deckhands lord it over the stewards. Into this neat little feudal environment Clark had thrust his anarchic temperament and his twenty-five Silicon Graphics computers—more computing power than you’d find in a big, fully automated factory. The crew members who did not understand computers suddenly discovered they were at the mercy of those who did. This posed some obvious threats to the peace.