Rating: 
Summary: Perfect for its intended use....
Review: First, this book is not to be taken too seriously. It is a tongue and cheek look at some of the more infamous dot.com flameouts in the last few years. If you love the website, then you will enjoy this book, as I did. However, if you are looking for an in depth examination of the tragic woes that hit the dot.com world, this is not your book. It is the often funny musings and rantings of man who saw the coming demise of the Internet Bubble while the New York brokerages were still puffing away about a never-ending new economy in their attempt to peddled extremely over priced stocks. A harbinger of doom, perhaps?Second, this book is a quick and easy read, perfect for commuters or those who enjoy reading during television commercials. Segments of the book, concerning a particular company, tend to be no longer than a few paragraphs each. Finally, this book does contain vast amounts of toilet humor, but again, any regular visitor to the website would expect nothing less from Pud, the author. Taken with a grain of salt, F'd Companies makes a nice afternoon appetizer.
Rating: 
Summary: Its good, IF you like F'dcompany.com
Review: Alright, those of you who aren't fans of f'dcompany.com I can understand your feelings about the book.. it is after all a "little" bit crass. But seriously I read the website often and after hearing all the bad press about the book, I had to read it for myself. Surprisingly, I like it! For starters Pud does not change his tone for the book, he's crass on the site and he's crass on the book which to me, is honest. But mostly, I don't think he just regurgitates whats on the site.. he groups them into different segments and offers his views on why he thinks they went out of business PLUS he includes the amount of money blown for each f'd company. So alright, its a rehash, but hey, you can get all of this in a nice, fun to read (in a Pud's way) digest without having to read through all the Joe Wang, ESC**W.com, racist, derogatory spam messages posted by some of the readers :) My buddy likes to think "big ideas".. all the time, and I'm going to buy him this book as a gift and tell him, next time before he goes and claims discovery of the next "killer app", to see if its already in this book.. and if not, I'll listen to him ;) Seriously, if you enjoy the site, you'll enjoy the book. I did.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent!!! Now this is quality entertainment!
Review: I wish I could find another book as funny and informative as this one. It is definitely one of my favorites!
Rating:
Summary: Dot.funny
Review: F'd is a catalogue of all the dot.com flameouts and foibles. It is also laced with Philip Kaplan's cutting, biting, ascerbic, scalding, acidic, vitriolic commentary that tends to sum up the disgust that so many people have at the lavish and stupid business practices of the dot.coms. While this isn't necessarily a history of the crash, the book is organized into theme sections. These sections point out broad trends in the dot.com industry and help create a picture of why so many failed. Kaplan's expertise as a guide in this murky, sometimes corrupt world of dot.coms is helpful, and is done in a way in which the lay reader can actually understand how these dot.coms actually worked. This book doesn't take the internet or the digital world too seriously, and, above all, Kaplan has a self-deprecating manner of story telling that is charming. For awhile. At times, the reader is left to wonder whether or not he is telling you about these ridiculous companies to make a point, or just to make fun. He is a bright guy, and very, very funny. However, sometimes his R-rated commentary detracted from his really commendable insight into why these companies flamed and why such high hopes were pinned on them. It seems to me that the editor (or publisher) could have shown a little more restraint and had a much cleaner, tighter book. However, even at its worst, this book is still highly enjoyable and entertaining. No one interested in the dot.com bust of the late 1990s should be without this book. Besides, maybe this review is just the vitriolic rambling of some ... (a Kaplan original) that still is bitter because I have some Flooz that I could never use.
Rating: 
Summary: Easy Reading But Get Tiresome After Awhile
Review: I just read this book in about 3-4 hours so it is very easy reading since the vocabulary is very elementary. Also the text is pretty big and there is alot of white...even more than a screenplay. I gave it two stars because some of the humor is funny but more from the stupidity behind the idea of the dot-com than from the author. It is also a good summary of some of the failed ideas of the Internet Bubble and the author does provide some good ideas on why they failed. But it stops here. There are not enough facts and figures to explain why they really failed since this book is mostly fabricated from his website in which its content is very subjective and far from factual. Alot more research would have to be conducted to make this a better case study book. How can a critic say this book will be read by future business students? Just because an idea didn't work out does that make it a bad idea or perhaps some other piece is at fault? For instance, bid.com and clickabid.com were auction sites that failed, but ebay is still in business - why is that? Also, the author's cynicism and attempts at humor get really tiresome half-way through the book. Kaplan makes fun at most of the dot-coms by saying that they didn't care what they were doing as long they can cash-out early, but he is guilty of the same thing with his attempt at this book.
Rating: 
Summary: A Front Row Seat to the Dot.Com Implosion
Review: Philip J. Kaplan didn't set out to chronicle the disappointment and wrath of so many dot-commers burned by the internet bubble. But one Memorial Day weekend in 2000, trying to kill some time, Kaplan ( a web designer at the time) set up a site, F**kedcompany.com. The site offered the latest gossip about sinking dot-coms and even included an online betting pool on when companies would go under. Kaplan suddenly found himself thrust into the spotlight as a kind of overseer of the dot-com collapse. And while Kaplan often refers to himself as an "idiot" throughout the book, he nonetheless clearly loves the hype generated by his website. He has been profiled by "The New York Times," "Salon.com," and ABC News's "20/20." among others. In this book, Kaplan offers capsule descriptions of about 150 of the looniest ideas and largest implosions. Kaplan reveals how many millions the companies burned through and gives, in sometimes clever but crude language, his sarcastic explanation for the failure of the many companies he skewers. He garnered much of his information from the website. His website's betting pool assigned high scores to those submitting the best information about coming dot-com catastrophes. There was no actual monetary payout, winning is its own reward.) he was inundated with e-mails from employees, who were often angry, bitter, or just out to stick a knife in an occasional back, reporting rumors of pending layoffs, shutdowns, and bankruptcies. As more companies failed, an almost sick fascination with the site grew, its notoriety spread, and disgruntled employees continued to send thousands of e-mails regarding various internet companies. The information often turned out to be accurate, that reading the postings was like knowing a train wreck was coming and having to set up near the tracks and watch. And people clearly loved watching company after company flameout and wreck. The book spotlights many companies, among them: the sports site MVP.com, Webvan, and some you may never have heard of, such as little known Third Voice. Third Voice's pitch? It offered what amounted to virtual "sticky notes" which could be attached to websites. It had no real practical application, other than to potential muck up the websites of other businesses, yet investors poured some $15 million into the company. Like his website, the book maintains a satirical tone which both amuses and irritates at times. The book may not be quite as timely as Kaplan might hope as there have been numerous other recent books which have chronicled the idiocy of the internet explosion. Still, Kaplan had a front row seat for much of the implosion, and it certainly makes for an entertaining read.
Rating: 
Summary: PUD is as F*(^%ED As the Dot Coms
Review: This book is a very sad rant by Pud (Kapaln), himself a washed out dot.commer. Here is a guy who rips into many companies from which he ran banners on his site. They became F&*#ED when he could not longer get them to advertise. (HotJobs for example.) Anyone who actually is able to learn anything from this garbage probably did not pass Business 1A. All in all, a waste of paper.
Rating:
Summary: Cut, Paste, Get Million Dollar Check
Review: Classic Pud here. I'm guessing he did this on purpose, just to flaunt something, not sure what. Literally Cut, Paste, Spell Check, Get 1,000,000 check. End of story.
Rating:
Summary: Too glossy, no meat
Review: I was expecting a little more substance from the book, perhaps some deeper examples and some better analysis and dirt and gossip from the wackoes that ran these dot coms, but the book was no more than a listing with a blurb at best on a whole stack of companies that went under. The blurbs were funny to read at first, but get old and dull pretty fast, and the whole thing ends up being a fun read for no more than 10 pages. It's a shame, I would think there's a lot of good dirt to dredge up and write about, and I was hoping this would touch on that, but it doesn't. I would skip this one.
Rating:
Summary: Are readers getting f'd?
Review: Kaplan reminds us at least half a dozen times in the book that he's "an idiot." That's quote unquote. But if so, he's an idiot with a gimmick, the gimmick being misery loves company, and he's here to provide it in the form of "look who else was just as dumb as you" (or maybe even dumber)! Well, no. No dot com investor is going to be reading this book. Pain is pain. Readers of this book will be down-sized dot com ex-employees finding some gallows humor in all the billions of wisenheimer dollars that went down the dot com drain. With the pages of this book and the stock certificates of the companies chortled over herein, one can paper a wall or...well, you can read the fine suggestions from readers below. But the really disappointing thing about this "book" is that Kaplan didn't even try to be informative about the companies he chuckles over. I mean most bits were something like two hundred words and out, and some of that was pure repetition and woefully inadequate explanation. He just went with what he thought he knew, research be damned, threw in a few of his hormonal obsessions, stirred in some "shocking the bourgeoisie" language, some crude high school humor, and laughed all the way to the bank. The only real "insight" into what happened provided by Kaplan is the "duh" observation (which he repeats again and again) that enterprises for profit really ought to charge their customers more for the product or service than they pay to provide it. And folks, this is a Simon and Schuster book, beautifully presented, typo free, and reasonably well edited. I mean, was there a war in the boardroom when they discussed publishing this? Didn't they (royalty publishers are investors) get the idea that they were being taken to the cleaners same as the idiots who threw their money down the dot com drain? But then again, maybe this book is making money and the laugh is on the buyer. (Not me. I borrowed it from the library.) At any rate, the book design by Bonni Leon-Berman deserved a better text. However, this is not to say we can't learn something here. But I think Phineas Taylor Barnum said it a lot better in just six words: "There's a sucker born every minute." Final note: on page 116, in "explaining" how send.com went bottom up, Kaplan focuses on its shipments of bottles of "exceptional wine...wrapped in...crisp, white linen...," and sums up with this pithy comment: "I chug wine." Yes, Kaplan is the kind of guy who would chug-a-lug Chateau Petrus and that really does explain everything.
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