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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A bit too wacky dude when it could have been so much more, 3 May 2001
This is an easy to read book written for people who feel they need some insight into the lives and minds of those who are crafting out IT futures. The style of writing of this book is best described as a compromise between wacky dude and deadly serious. There are lots of references to the way that people in the Net industry dress (skateboard attire, baseball caps on back to front), the way they talk (hey, man!), the way they think (there are many variations here, ranging from 'this time next year Rodney, we'll be millionaires' to '________' ie complete silence).Overall, the message of the book is a serious one: that people working in the Internet Business are overworked, often under trained, likely to have a crack at anything and then sign off as if the whole thing works when patently it doesn't. There are some rip off merchants described in this book: for example, the couple who steal an entire idea as their own and make some serious money out of it only to let the idea fail through their own incompetence. There are people described here who enter the business with vigour, they love life and they want to become surgically attached to their monitor and keyboard, their HTML code and their desks ... within a relatively short space of time they are burned out, they are disaffected and they quit only to live the rest of their lives in purgatory ... or bliss. Of all the characters that walk Lessard and Baldwin's cat walk (or should it be net walk?), this is the description that made me laugh out loud: "Short and paunchy, Mencken had muttonchop sideburns, which he often topped off with a big cowboy hat. His intent was to look like a badass, but given his physical limitations, he came off more like a troll with attitude." Page 51 This one appealed to me most of all because it epitomises the character of someone who I was working with at the time I read that.. Given the style of the book: take a topic, introduce it, paint a picture of the average character within that topic and then tell one person's story as they were affected by the topic, it's not fair to try to summarise what Lessard and Baldwin have done. However, they have a serious message that I interpret as: The internet is a serious business and there are some serious people in it. Nevertheless, there are opportunities for people to be exploited (eg Green Card holders working for peanuts who are aspiring to US citizenship), there are people with ideas being ripped off, there are managers who aren't fit to manage their own toilet habits let alone departments and projects. Secondly, I confirmed the idea that I have had for a while now: the internet is not a free form of business or communication as many would have us believe. There are those that believe that the internet is different because it's of, for and by the people. Unfortunately, that's only true to an extent The internet is being driven by business towards becoming another standard business model that can be used and manipulated in the way that the standard business model can. What this means is that the average person who wants to be free to do his thing on the internet, to find his level, can do so but only to an extent. Here's an example of what I mean: in the early days of the world wide web, it seemed possible to find just about any page that was up there by going to a search engine and doing a search. 6 or 7 years later, do a search on a search engine and pages that I know to be there are sometimes impossible to find. I think it's business has taken over the free flow of information and ideas by this mechanism: what they've done is to refine the search process so that it only finds specific information in specific parts of any web page rather than the whole web page. Finally, the book has been written with the help of real net slaves: people working in the industry in exactly the way the stories are written. However, the companies reported on are given fictitious names, presumably in an attempt to protect the innocent. Nevertheless, it is possible to recognise most of them if you remember the stories that Lessard and Baldwin throw out from time to time. Since it is relatively easy to spot the companies, I wonder in the end whether it was worth trying to disguise them! One of those books that can be read on a train, a boat or a plane. I wouldn't necessarily rush out to buy a copy; but if it's left lying around anywhere, pick it up and give it the once over!
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