Silicon Valley Fever: The Growth of High-Technology Culture [Hardcover]

Everett M. Rogers (Author), Judith K. Larsen (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1984

Pages clean and unmarked. Slight wear from time on shelf like you would see on a major chain. Immediate shipping.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 302 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books; First Edition edition (March 1984)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0465078214
• ISBN-13: 978-0465078219
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.1 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #849,738 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Vivid illustration of Silicon Valley, March 20, 2003

By 

Suckwoo Lee (Seoul, Seoul South Korea) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Silicon Valley Fever: The Growth of High-Technology Culture (Hardcover)

This book could be dubbed as the ethnography of Silicon Valley in the eye of anthropologist. This book seems outdated at first glance. It¡¯s two-decades-old, published in 1984. Since that time, so much has happened in the computer industry, the bread and butter of the Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley saw in the 1980s the era of microcomputer (PC) and in the 1990s the advent of the age of Internet. This book couldn¡¯t deal with those kind of events naturally. But the underlying characteristics of the area hasn¡¯t changed. Venture capitals and job-hoppings, hyper-competitive and individualistic lifestyle are there as usual. And those are vividly illustrated in this book with the texture of real business rendered with data garnered from interviews and anecdotes of not only eminent figures in the area but also ranks and files of the businesses. This book is inundated with lively details. Though there are flood of materials on Silicon Valley these days, this book doesn¡¯t lose its relevancy for the weight of time. I strongly recommend this book if you want to figure out the way of doing in Silicon Valley.

5.0 out of 5 stars An old but great book about SIlicon Valley, November 15, 2011

By 

Herve Lebret (Lausanne, Switzerland) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Silicon Valley Fever: The Growth of High-Technology Culture (Hardcover)

I was cleaning and filing old papers in my office, when I found "old" books about Silicon Valley and noticed how this amazing region has not really changed in the last 30 years. Let me just elaborate. The first book I looked at is Silicon Valley Fever. The next one is The New Venturers. Both were written in the mid-eighties. The New Venturers does not seem to be printed anymore and I wrote on Amazon in 2009, when I bought it, "In the mid 80s John Wilson published this book about venture capital. At the time, it was about business and how venture capital works. It has now become a history book and it shows how Silicon Valley developed in part thanks to venture capital. It is full of anecdotes, facts and figures. A great book... "

Silicon Valley Fever is also out of print and there is no review for that one on Amazon! It is also a book I enjoyed reading. As a funny coincidence, the authors began their book with their history of Apple whereas my first chapter was the history of Google. Each decade has its role models. There is a section about Women and Entrepreneurship that Pemo Theodore would certainly appreciate: "The Silicon Valley has been called "one of the last great bastions of male dominance" by the local Peninsula Times Tribune. [...] They are under-represented in management and administration. Few women have technical or engineering backgrounds. [...] Why there are few women in positioning of responsability in Silicon Valley is complex and puzzling. Until recently, the overwhelming majority of engineering garduates were men. [...] Scientific and engineering professionals in the finance community and in start-ups are likely to be men: these power-brokers rely exclusively on tehir personal networks. [...] Twenty of the largest publicly held Silicon Valley firms listed a total of 209 persons as corporate officers in 1980; only 4 were women. The board of directors of these 20 firms include 150 directors. Only one was a woman: Shirley Hufstedler, serving on the board of Hewlett-Packard." But the authors are optimistic: they explain that any woman with a technical background or an interest in high-tech has opportunities: "A Martian with three heads could find a job in Silicon Valley. So for women with a technical background, it's terrific. [...] An exception to masculine dominance is Sandy Kurtzig. "I wanted to start in a garage like HP, but I didn't have one. So I started in a second bedroom of my apartment." At first, Kurtzig did sales, bookkeeping and management of her start-up. As long as she had only five or six employees, they worked out of her apartment. It went into rapid growth and had annual sales in 1982."