🚀 go-pugleaf

                      Spring Quarter Seminar Series

   Seminars dedicated to bringing together academic researchers and  
 industry practitioners to discuss computer industry trends and issues

Seminars will be held on Thursday from 4 - 5:15 p.m. at the Stanford     
             Graduate School of Business, Littlefield Center


Thursday, May 11, Littlefield Center, Rm. 104.

Dr. Jerry Kaplan, Founder and CEO of GO Corporation about his new book
"Start-Up: A Silicon Valley Adventure," Houghton Mifflin Company, 1995
(Copies appeared at the Stanford Bookstore and Stacey's just last week)

Jerry spent a few years doing research in artificial intelligence here at
Stanford, after getting his Ph.D. from Penn in 1979. He met Mitch Kapor in
1984, and went off to develop a new kind of "personal information manager,"
which became Lotus Agenda. In 1987, Jerry founded GO, to realize his vision
of personal computing freed from the desktop. AT&T bought the company in
1994, and six months later disbanded it. He has started a new company
involved in reinventing on-line shopping.

>From Chapter 14 of "Startup"...

  "When I was five, my parents got a portable television set for my
  bedroom. At first I was afraid to get dressed in front of it, for fear
  that the people on the screen could see me, just as I could see them. I
  knew that the gray, blurry pictures were merely signals magically
  sent through the air, but I didn't understand which qualities of
  living human beings carried over to the new machine. Like the rest of
  my generation, I was captivated by this limitless window on the
  world, and what I saw seemed as real to me as my own two hands.

  Through the power of television, I knew that lions were large, proud
  creatures that roared and lived in Africa. But one day my father took
  me to see the big cats at the Bronx Zoo. I could barely relate the
  coarse, smelly creatures in front of me - lying docile and panting in
  their cages while flies buzzed around their heads - to what I had
  witnessed from the comfort of my bedroom. The TV images just didn't
  capture the real experience.

  Sitting in the briefing rooms of AT&T thirty-five years later,
  watching staffers project spreadsheets, graphs, and slides from
  their portable computers onto the large screen monitors, I realized
  that computers mislead managers just as television misleads kids.
  Fed a steady diet of numbers and charts from the comfort of their
  conference room chairs, senior executives experience only a
  desiccated version of the powerful forces that shape and grow their
  organizations. Mistaking these two-dimensional reflections for
  reality, they shadowbox their way through complex decisions,
  unwittingly jostled in one direction or another by self-interested
  emissaries, who can spin a tale of threat and opportunity as
  skillfully as any Hollywood screenwriter.

  In these rooms, individuals are stripped of their unique skills and
  reduced to chits, then shifted from one column to another. Complex
  working relationships, knitted together over time like trees
  intertwining their limbs, become statistical learning curves.
  Loyalty and trust, painstakingly earned through years of
  delivering useful products and serving customers' needs, are
  measured as the difference between market capitalization and book
  value. Real human wealth, in the form of security, freedom,
  productivity, and knowledge, is scarcely captured by unexercised
  stock options. There are no line items that gauge the real engines of
  prosperity: vision, passion, and commitment. The plain truth is you
  cannot suck reality from the hypnotic glow of a vacuum tube."

  __________

Future Talks

May 25. Prof. Robert Burgelman, Stanford GSB. A discussion of his paper
            on the operating systems market (available via Regina, below).

June 1.  Prof. AnnaLee Saxenian, UC Berkeley. "Regional Advantage,"
             based on her 1994 book (Harvard Univ. Press) comparing
             Route 128 and Silicon Valley.

For more information, please contact Regina Smith, GSB 316, 725-7096