Rating: 
Summary: Great insight even for the non-investor
Review: The high-tech stock collapse has led to a lot of agonized soul searching from burned investors in the past year. How in the world did all those dot-com pet stores get funded? How did Cisco ever get a $500 billion dollar market cap, and how did so many other companies get valued at tens of billions of dollars with no profits and little sales? Well, one problem was that too many people read this book. Don't get me wrong--Geoffrey Moore is definitely a heavyweight business thinker. His earlier books were tremendously helpful in explaining the strange, non-intuitive ways in which high-tech markets work. But here, he and his coauthors attempt to build on his earlier work to offer a "gorilla investment strategy", which has now become a victim of its own popularity. *Any* mechanical investment scheme will eventually fail if it becomes too widely used, and it is easy to find the roots of the investment idiocies of the late nineties in this book. Just look for emerging high-tech market leaders, he says over and over, with little attention paid to just how much this eventual market dominance might be worth. Worse, he asserts that you can't know which company will emerge as the dominant player in a given sector, so invest in them all. Venture capitalists, once they realized how many investors were following this strategy, responded by cranking out unlimited numbers of startups doing exactly the same thing; as long as they were competing in a market that might eventually select a "gorilla", then they could be confident of "flipping" a successful IPO to naive investors. Anyone who used this book as a basis for investing over the past couple of years would have, in effect, been getting suckered into a Ponzi scheme. Moore creates a vivid symbolic menagerie to explain the dynamics of high-tech marketing, but any high-tech investor needs to know that in addition to the authors' gorillas, chimpanzees and monkeys there are a lot of dogs. Also sharks.
Rating: 
Summary: Need more tech than investment savvy
Review: This book came to me highly recommended by a friend and I read it in no time at all, very well presented and very readable. The only thing is to get the most out of it you need to have a lot of tech knowledge. I work for an e-business consultancy and I found the idea of picking the basket of stocks in a potential Gorilla industry a bit of an intimidating task. However, it does point out you can make a lot of cash from investing later in the game as it becomes more obvious who the key player is, this is probably a better approach than the one they advocate for most people.
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