Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, “The Outliers” came out on Tuesday, November 12, and everyone is talking about it. Though not everybody is impressed with his third offering, it has sparked a lot of conversation. I still haven’t picked up my copy of “The Outliers,” since I’m still working on his first best-seller “The Tipping Point.” I know, I feel very behind on the times. I might be what Gladwell would call a Late Bloomer, even.
I’m still trying to figure out whether I like “The Tipping Point” or not. It’s very strange to read a book that is critically acclaimed, but that somehow feels a little empty. I’m not saying that “The Tipping Point” is a bad book, by any means. In fact, I’m finding very entertaining, it’s well-written, and the style has a nice flow. He goes from one idea to the next, but always brings you back to the original place. I like that. Gladwell’s voice is witty and intelligent; you get a real sense that he has done his research and has the confidence to articulate his interpretation. I am looking forward to finishing it.
I’m also looking forward to his new book, more than anything out of curiosity. The Guardian posted an excerpt from his new book, you can click here to read the whole story. Here’s a sampling. Remember, some have called him a genius.
The University of Michigan opened its new computer centre in 1971, in a low-slung building on Beal Avenue in Ann Arbor. The university’s enormous mainframe computers stood in the middle of a vast, white-tiled room, looking, as one faculty member remembers, “like one of the last scenes in 2001: A Space Odyssey”. Off to the side were dozens of key-punch machines - what passed in those days for computer terminals. Over the years, thousands of students would pass through that white-tiled room - the most famous of whom was a gawky teenager named Bill Joy.
Joy came to the University of Michigan the year the computer centre opened, at the age of 16. He had been voted “most studious student” by his graduating class at North Framingham high school, outside Detroit, which, as he puts it, meant he was a “no-date nerd”. He had thought he might end up as a biologist or a mathematician, but late in his freshman year he stumbled across the computing centre - and he was hooked.
From then on, the computer centre was his life. He programmed whenever he could. He got a job with a computer science professor, so he could program over the summer. In 1975, Joy enrolled in graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley. There, he buried himself even deeper in the world of computer software. During the oral exams for his PhD, he made up a particularly complicated algorithm on the fly that - as one of his many admirers has written - “so stunned his examiners [that] one of them later compared the experience to ‘Jesus confounding his elders’ “.
After Berkeley, Joy co-founded the Silicon Valley firm Sun Microsystems. There, he rewrote another computer language, Java, and his legend grew still further. Among Silicon Valley insiders, Joy is spoken of with as much awe as Bill Gates. He is sometimes called the Edison of the internet.
The story of Joy’s genius has been told many times, and the lesson is always the same. Here was a world that was the purest of meritocracies. Computer programming didn’t operate as an old-boy network, where you got ahead because of money or connections. It was a wide-open field, in which all participants were judged solely by their talent and accomplishments. It was a world where the best men won, and Joy was clearly one of those best men.
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
