Rating: 
Summary: terrific and still timely
Review:
A "vast Shakespearean farce"--that's John Cassidy's take on the Internet bubble. Dot.con is an intellectually rewarding book. The writing is exceptional, the research impeccable. Like a fastidious historian, Cassidy tracks the bubble from its beginnings to its demise, including the economic and psychological ramifications of Sept 11th, 2001. Besides Schiller's "Irrational exuberance" and Startup.com, a documentary, dot.con stands as one of the best accounts of the dot.com debacle. Highly recommended.
Rating: 
Summary: Good Warning on never wasting your money on Dot.Com's agaim.
Review: Well the book breaks it down to here was this quick and easy way to make money quick and Dot.Com stocks became way more then their real worth. Too much money investments,too many web-sites run by geeks who have no business sense, and little brain power led to the demise of this business trend just as fast as it began. Today the Internet is largly used by geeks who have no life and no class either.
Rating: 
Summary: They could have been more thorough...
Review: An examination of the dot.com stock bubble. Amazing number of typos and wrong numbers. Interesting reading, but I really have a problem with books like this. They come off as knowing what was happening when it was happening. In reality, without the benefit of hindsight they are no more knowledgeable than we are.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent, Highly Recommended.
Review: An excellent account of the rise and fall of the Dot Com bubble. Starts with a history of the internet and the world wide web and then moves into a detailed chronicle of the 1994-2001 internet stock market bubble. For someone who knew a lot about the internet from 1998 onwards but little about the economy behind it, I found it a very interesting read and a great education. A great story, well written. Highly recommended for anyone interested in the stock market, the internet and especially e-commerce.
Rating:
Summary: Fascinating read
Review: As someone who spent most of the 1990s in junior high and high school, this book was a fascinating entree into the "irrational exhuberance" of the 1990s dot.com era, when any business remotely related to the internet could go public for millions (if not billions) of dollars, even with steady losses and without a solid business plan. It was amazing to me to read about the number of investors who would buy stock in companies that hadn't proven anything, but simply had a website and believed they could tap into a certain percentage of an already- existing market. This book gives you an understanding of how AOL, a brand new company with much lower annual profits, could essentially acquire Time Warner, a larger company that had shown the test of time. More than that, the book shows you how investors - in fact, all of America - were overtaken by greed, irrationality, and a pack mentality that was ultimately detrimental. I wasn't mature enough during the 90s to really understand what was going on, and so I'm glad I read this book.
Rating:
Summary: One of the Great Stories of Our Times.
Review: I am a bit mystified by the fellow's remarks (as I am often mystified by Amazon reviewers) who says that there is little here that is new to a reader who kept abreast of the internet explosion (and subsequent implosion) in the New York Times, Forbes, and Wired. First of all, would he rather have had author John Cassidy make up some new facts to embellish an already incredible story? Or is he simply unable to see what a masterful synthesis of information his book is -- not to mention an insightful and cogent analysis of exactly what happened during the "Technological Gold Rush" of the New Millenium? Or does he think it might be better for the average reader to wade through more than a decades' pile of Forbes, New York Times, and Wired periodicals rather than read this book? (Actually, anyone who can read through a copy of Wired once should be commended!)
Anyway, the story that Cassidy tells may not be an ennobling one, but it is certainly an astonishing and entertaining one, filled with hubris, greed, hype, charlatanism -- along with imagination, drama, and hope, too. Here from p. 314 is what might be considered its thesis:
"In retrospect, the period from 1989 to 2001 looks like an historic aberration, an extended time-out, during which the normal conditions of human conflict and international rivalry were temporarily suspended (for most people living in the West, at least). In this vacuum, technological utopianism and several other varieties of mushy thinking flourished."
At any rate, I strongly suspect that people will be reading this book fifty years from now in order to get a contemporary account of what happened.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Historical Account of the Dot.com Bust
Review: Mr. Cassidy writes an excellent historical account of the dot.com bust. He spices the historical information with good descriptions of why certain things were done according to "business rules." Having worked for a defunct .com myself, I found this book to be quite informative about the one end of business all the technicians and developers didn't want to know about -- the cash flow. Looking back, many of the warning signs that Mr. Cassidy notes were there for all of us in the company to have seen...if we had known what to look for. An excellent work on a piece of history we should all study much closer.
Rating:
Summary: An Instant Classic
Review: New Yorker financial writer, John Cassidy, says it all in this brilliantly rendered, highly entertaining account of the biggest economic scandal of the last twenty-five years--Enron who?--the crash and burn of the relentlessly hyped dot.com sector. One part historic overview, two parts searing indictman of the financial-technological-media nexus, Dot.Con--as the Wall Street Journal said last week--will be read by generations of Wharton and Harvard B school grads still unborn. Not since John Kenneth Galbraith have we had a popular economist with this kind of reach--or depth. Bravo.
Rating:
Summary: Finally, Somone 'Ventures' Down The Path and Crash
Review: Thank you, John Cassidy!
As the get rich quick, good time rock and roll, everybody is a genius lifestyle of the 1990's rolled on, more and more money went into investments, mutual funds, bonds and retirement instruments. Then, the 'next big thing' hit... Time to suck the money...... Ahhh, the internet... Everybody gets rich! Fund managers, investment banks, VCs and Joe six pack funnel their safe monies from their retirement harbors to the next big thing. Dot.Coms. The trouble is it all crashes in 2000 and the drain hits the economy in 2001 and 2002. Where'd all the money go? Mr. Cassidy does a great job laying out the different playing fields, the politics in control during this period, the major and minor figures and the end result. The speculators and the market hype were out of control. Forget the fact that most of the 'ideas' were unproven and the companies had no cash flow. The business models were overly optomisitc and the Federal Government tooted their horns. What a wealth of information. If one reads this with an open mind and a dose of reality you'll see where the money is (people still have it), why grandma has no retirement and why the economy of the 1990's was a shell game of double postings. It is laid out very well. Maybe too much emphasis is placed on Alan Greenspan and not enough on the SEC and the Department of the Treasury? Read this more than once..... There are great economic and investment lessons here. In some areas you would think you are reading the story of hustlers and confidence men.
Rating:
Summary: Competent overview but not without flaws
Review: The first thing you'd say about this book is that, however clever the title, it's erroneous: this isn't the story of a "con" at all, it's the story of a speculative bubble. The whole point is that no-one was "conned" by the hot air. As Cassidy mentions from the outset, the prospectuses all contained large print health warnings in prominent places: "THIS COMPANY HAS NEVER MADE ANY MONEY, MOST LIKELY NEVER WILL" - but the punters still bought and bought. There were many psychological and sociological factors at play, but deception was not one of them. For all that, Dot Con is well researched, well written and entertaining into the bargain (my copy was the paperback second edition in which the typos & manifest errors spotted by keen Amazonians (none of which, in my view, was earth-shattering) had been corrected). Cassidy describes briefly and competently the history of the internet and the general financial environment of the last 50 years, and then takes you into the maelstrom of the bubble from 1995 to 2001, all of which he portrays in suitably stunned-mullet fashion. The new edition features a lengthy epilogue which surveys the wreckage and covers the subsequent inquiry into the practices of investment banking firms and their uneasy relationships with their research analysts, all of which is still very current. While he doesn't really dwell on it, I think Cassidy would come out in favour of more market regulation and intervention: He's especially critical of the Fed's approach to monetary policy and the atmosphere on the street which led to the boom in the first place. In some ways (though it's hardly fashionable to say so) the investment banking firms and fund managers were as much victims of this as anyone: while the roof is blowing off the market and the choice is to join in and make hay, or watch your competitors annexing large portions of your market share while you sit on your hands, it is a singular Wall Street firm indeed which chooses to sit the boom out. In any event this is a thoughtful and well put together book and serves as a pretty good overview of some of the most remarkable times in the history of modern finance.
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