Rating: 
Summary: Good summary
Review: All the stories were told many times in other books. There is nothing new about this book. However, it serves as a good summary for those CEOs or senior managers who wish to have a quick review of what happened in the last two years, but never paid attention to this dot.com industry, now dot.con.....
Rating: 
Summary: When will we ever learn
Review: Do yourself a favor and a favor for your children and your children's children. Buy this book. Read it then put it away but in a prominent place so that when you or your future generations think the world has changed and there's a new world order and a new economic order. Take this book from the bookshelf and read it thoroughly before even beginning to make any financial judgements.
Rating:
Summary: totally absorbing and enlightening
Review: It seems incredible now, but just three short years ago, investors valued priceline.com, a startup retailer that was losing three dollars for every dollar it brought in, more than the entire U.S. airline industry. Two years later, you could not have traded this company for the cost of two Boeing 747s.Priceline.com was not unique. Similar valuation absurdities happened hundreds of times during the late 1990s and 2000. This fascinating book explains how such "dot.cons", irrational exuberancy, and the stock market bubble that ended in 2000 came to pass. The writing is clear, fluent, comprehensive, insightful, and totally absorbing. It reminds me a lot of John Kenneth Galbraith's classic book "The Great Crash of 1929", both in subject matter and style. As Galbraith himself says on the back cover "I cannot recommend it more strongly." What more can I say?
Rating: 
Summary: Embarrassing errors, spelling mistakes and confused facts
Review: This should be a book of fiction. I don't know if I can count all the obvious factual errors. Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, has his name wrong. He claims the Altair computer was named after a character in Star Wars. If the Altair computer was invented in 1975, and Star Wars came out in 1977, how was that possible? Duh... The book states: "In 1978, two Chicago students, Randy Seuss and Ward Christensen, invented the modem...."
No they didn't! In 1977, Christensen wrote Xmodem, the first computer program used to transfer files between computers equipped with modems; a year later, he teamed with Seuss to create the first "bulletin board system" software.
Again, Duh....
The CON here is obviously the publisher, Hyberbole, who got conned by a financial writer who apparantly had a bunch of news snippets he gathered to form a book. There is NO STORY here. Just pieces of information pasted together to form a book. The sad part is, much of the information is mis-spelled, misunderstood by the author, grammictally incorrect or just plain false.
To think people are reading this and thinking they are "Learning" something about the internet craze would be like reading a science fiction novel and think you are learning about NASA.
Rating:
Summary: need a fact-checker
Review: Good review of Internet bubble and crash. A few factual errors though on non-US events, ie. Thai baht was devalued July 1997, NOT 1996.
Rating: 
Summary: Good if dry coverage of dot.com bust
Review: There have been a lot of books about the crash of the high tech market. This is one of the best. The coverage is thorough if at times tedious. Cassidy makes an excellent case that the lack of a business model and the prevalent "greater fool" theory led to the demise of the Internet bubble. Too many pitched the idea that if their site captured just one percent of a [Hundred] billion-dollar market, than the firm would be a success. Only even one percent was a pipe dream, and perhaps a dozen firms had the same idea. And the "greater fool" theory suggests that even if the originators are wrong, somebody else will be foolish enough to buy them out. Cassidy concludes his good work with a lengthy table of dot.com failures, a sobering story in itself. Perhaps it is so sobering that the life and exhuberance of the subject drained away. I found the last third of the book to be more of a continuous litany of mistakes and I lost much of my interest.
Rating:
Summary: ¿Dot Caveat¿
Review: "Dot Caveat" or. Caveat, as is the only alliterative verbal "bomb" that has not been dropped on the Internet and computing since the inevitable "Dot Bomb" failures among the most significant forces ever to hit any economy have the latest wag, as Wall Street 'nay-sayer' John Cassidy, and the Internet 'bear' to end all bears on the market has now written the alliterative "masterpiece" of Luddism expounding on the years 1995-2000. Cassidy has called his new book: "Dot Con-The Greatest Story Ever Sold." Since most all our Silicon Valley folks are atheists, who think religion is the greatest story ever sold, the title has its hilarity and nuances to bear as we cross it. The greatest thing that has happened to computing and the Internet are the elegant and ugly failures that mark it's first days like Pierce Arrow and Edsel automobiles or the "Spruce Goose" and "Flying Wing" were to aircraft were to those industries and social changes that came with them. Failure is what makes us and our society grow stronger unless you are European, and anti-business, or as much anti-progressive as John Cassidy writing his new book, "Dot Con." Cassidy is selling an Internet and computing story with no comparisons to anything but his ego and bearishness. I do not like books like this. Just forget "caveat emptor" as you read "Dot Con" as it is an interesting and flawed book. When we want a study in gullibility of readership deliberately put forth in authorship by failing to draw analogies to either the automotive or aircraft industry with computing and the Internet, just runoff and buy a copy of Cassidy's new book or search the dumpsters where it really belongs save for the good histories of the era applied to Cassidy's conclusions. Indeed Europeans managing Internet and Computing growth would have been disastrous as they do not allow those who fail back into business again. Cassidy still does not like the Internet from his horse-drawn buggy seat. He also made so many mistakes and typos that the book is a hilarious joke that includes not even getting the names of the founders of Microsoft correct, and many a fact gone agley. The Latin "caveat emptor" principle of "let the buyer beware principle applied in early common law that the buyer of defective goods could not hold the seller legally responsible. The theory of the early common law was based on the assumption that the buyer was able to examine the goods for any obvious defects, and that if the goods had latent defects of which the seller was unaware the buyer should bear the loss. "I told you so" Cassidy lampoons the Internet mania began a five-year run that was fueled in part by the media, the policies promoted by Alan Greenspan and the Federal Reserve, the rise of day trading, and the deluge of IPOs brought to market by firms such as Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch and their analyst cheerleaders Mary Meeker and Henry Blodget. 1995 is when Netscape went public, and since then the ingénue has had many opportunities to succeed and fail. The wise insider has had more opportunities to profit, too. Cassidy did not buy enough Microsoft stock. This is the nature of business, and life outside of utopian Europe and the socialism left sprawling and yawing in a gap of non-involvement typical of the "leisure" society there. The best is yet to come from the Internet, computing, and the IT revolution. The most vital force in society is the IT revolution., and it may yet force change in the "ding-dong" socialism of The European Union and it's Babel-like society where they have spent over ten years and still cannot decide what language to use for patents, as the rest of the world turns, unwise investors fail, and all of us look at the Internet, computing, and IT with far more respect than issuing from Cassidy in "Dot Con," which is a better name for his book than the history of the Internet and Computing. That "Dot Con-The Greatest Story Ever Sold," sells at all shows that Luddism is still alive and sporting websites. It made me so cross to read it that I even reviewed it. The EU ought to extend Cassidy honorary citizenship and a bureaucratic title and office for publishing it. He ought to be sent to Switzerland where there are no birds. They need him and his book to clean windscreens there. Other than humor I see no other use for it, since there are not enough birds there to foul the glass, or not enough failures to make IT any different than any other technological change in time....
Rating:
Summary: no news..."history" well told
Review: The all-too-familiar story of dizzying internet stock proces is told in an entertaining and reasonably sound manner. Though the book fails to bring to light anything new, it does provide an excellent summary of the events that led to the technological development, and the financial aspect of the 90's stock frenzy. While reading this book, we should keep in mind that predicting the past is not exactly difficult thing to do.Barring from a few embarrasing typos, the book is well presented and definetly deserves to be read..provides some good reference materials also in case anyone is interested to check up where the author brings his quotes or figures. Generally, a pleasurable reading experience and may learn a new "anecdote" or two about the Internet boom and gloom.
Rating:
Summary: Get Big Fast!
Review: John Creedy relates how Jeff Bezos had t-shirts with the Amazon.con's business plan "Get Big Fast!" made up for Amazon.com employees to wear. The goal of getting big fast was the naive belief by Bezos that it a relatively simple thing to establish a monopolistic business enterprise. This incredidbly simple minded theory of monopoly development was accepted and talked up by Wall Street analysts, such as Mary Meeker and Henry Blodgett, who in turn were treated as if they were "Nobel quality" economists, when in fact they were nothing more than common "Wall Street pimps." Unfortunately, for the investors that bought this argument, monopoly is either based on the exclusive ownership of a crucial input, where Microsoft's operating system is a reasonable example, or a government obtained privilege, such as the right to broadcast on a particular frequency. Of course pure monopoly is an abstraction, but it is interesting to note that Wall Mart, the inspiration of many internet retailers got big by becoming somewhat of a monopoly supplier in rural America where it was able to have regional markets more or less to itself. On the other hand, it is the nature of the internet to in theory eliminate the "separate" markets of rural America, or the world to the extent there is free trade across borders. This should have been clear to Wall Street. After all, according to Creedy Bill Gates, someone who knows a thing or two about establishing monopoly power, in the second edition of his book, The Road Ahead, noted that the internet was a competition enabling device rather than a device to generate monopoly profit.
Rating:
Summary: Interesting But Flawed Roundup
Review: Cassidy is a financial writer, and approaches the dot.com era from that standpoint. You won't read long stories about the bacchanalian excesses of the 'digerati' here, but you will get a sound explanation of how this absurd self-deluding mania started, grew and ended. His analysis of the role of various Wall Street analysts in fuelling the hype is brilliant. I hope some of them go to jail! Caveat: The book is characterized by some laughable typos and not a few mistakes on technology subjects. Don't publishers employ proofreaders anymore?
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