0.11 From here to infinity  (Page 2/9)

Now my carefully cultivated disdain for ambition felt cranky and pretentious. I decided I had wasted the best years of my life trying to turn myself into a young fogy, a curmudgeon. Ignoring Microsoft for all those years had been like turning my eyes from enlightenment. I saw myself as one of the yokels hanging around the Wright brothers’ bicycle shop laughing at them for thinking their invention would ever get off the ground. How could I not have seen what was coming at Microsoft? How could I not have seen that it was defining the future of the world?

This sudden, uncharacteristic, irresistible urge to be where the action is took on the proportions of a complete personality change, a midlife crisis. Disgusted with myself for having disdained ambition and settled for contentment, I sat down and wrote out two proposals—one, to Microsoft, asking permission to move into an office on its campus and follow along with a product team from beginning to end of a project, writing a book about its quest; and the other, to a publisher, asking for an advance to fund my research and writing. Snuggled into this remote corner of the country, living a life as temperate as the climate, hiding with my family among fellow dropouts, people in retreat, now struck me as an extravagant waste, an opting out of the excitement taking form only a few miles outside of town.

As if to reinforce my new conviction that the future not only of the world but also of Seattle belonged to the technology sector, a new group of wealthy tech-industrialists suddenly announced its intention to buy the Seattle Mariners and make the team a success in Seattle. Led by Japanese citizen and resident Hiroshi Yamauchi, the owner of Nintendo (the company’s American subsidiary was located just down the street from Microsoft), the group—which also included several Microsoft executives—declared its eagerness to pay $100 million for the moribund franchise and turn it into a title contender no matter what the cost. Depending on how you define “contender,” Seattle’s still waiting for the owners to deliver.

For a number of reasons, this was a Seattle historical first. It was the first time owners moneyed enough to compete with big-market teams like the New York Yankees declared themselves willing to invest in Seattle baseball; it was the first time local fans, more excited by the announcement than about anything the Mariners had ever done on the ballfield, reacted with anything other than weary cynicism to the news that new team owners promised to spend at legitimately competitive levels; it was the first time the local technology sector bought into a Seattle pro sports franchise; and it was the first time a Japanese businessman tried to buy an American major-league baseball team.

The press conference announcing the intended purchase sent the strongest signal to date that Seattle was fast becoming a tech-industry town. Present at the conference was Slade Gorton, the longtime U.S. Senator from Washington who as Washington State Attorney General in the 1970s had successfully sued Major League Baseball over the theft of the Seattle Pilots, winning a settlement that included placement of an expansion franchise—the Mariners—in Seattle. Gorton was part of the senatorial generation succeeding Senators for Life Warren Magnuson and Henry “Scoop” Jackson, the latter known throughout his tenure as the “Senator from Boeing,” and Gorton, now serving the technology sector as assiduously as his elders had served the aerospace sector, was doing what Senators had always done: follow the money.