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Dot.con: How America Lost Its Mind and Money in the Internet Era
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List Price:
$15.95
Homebizpc.com Price:
$15.15
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Availability: N/A
Manufacturer: Harper Perennial
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Average Customer Rating:   
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 381.1
EAN: 9780060008819
ISBN: 0060008814
Label: Harper Perennial
Manufacturer: Harper Perennial
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 416
Publication Date: 2003-05-01
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Release Date: 2003-05-13
Studio: Harper Perennial
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Editorial Reviews:
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The Internet stock bubble wasn't just about goggle-eyed day traderstrying to get rich on the Nasdaq and goateed twenty-five-year-olds playing wannabe Bill Gates. It was also about an America that believed it had discovered the secret of eternal prosperity: it said something about all of us, and what we thought about ourselves, as the twenty-first century dawned. John Cassidy's Dot.con brings this tumultuous episode to life. Moving from the Cold War Pentagon to Silicon Valley to Wall Street and into the homes of millions of Americans, Cassidy tells the story of the great boom and bust in an authoritative and entertaining narrative. Featuring all the iconic figures of the Internet era -- Marc Andreessen, Jeff Bezos, Steve Case, Alan Greenspan, and many others -- and with a new Afterword on the aftermath of the bust, Dot.con is a panoramic and stirring account of human greed and gullibility.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Hype and dashed hopes
Comment: John Cassidy's book will become a classic in depth description of another example of crowd madness: the irrational speculation in internet (.com) companies in the 1990s.
The collective insanity was mind-boggling. Most newly issued companies on the stock market had losses that were a multiple of their revenues. Their P/E values were infinite, defying all economic and financial fundamentals. The more money they took in, the more money they lost. However, their founding shareholders still managed to get their holdings valued at billions of dollars, becoming instantly mil- and billionaires when their companies were launched on the stock market.
The investment bankers, knowing perfectly that in most cases they were selling only pieces of paper, fought for the fantastic commissions, while the speculators bid the shares up sometimes hundreds of percents at the start of trading.
When the NASDAQ bubble burst, 7 trillion $ (70,000 $ for each US household) disappeared as smoke in the sky. Those who were holding the bag had the impression that they had been victims of an elaborate scam, where corporate insiders had fleeced the outsiders, the gullible private investors. But, it was a classic story of greed, credulity and herd behavior based on technological utopianism. The ultimate real victims were those who had placed their life savings in technology and Internet stocks.
When all the dust was settled, a few companies survived and even prospered mightily (Microsoft, Cisco, Oracle, Intel, eBay, Amazon.com).
But above all, Internet was created and will be here till the end of times. It was heavily criticized by the public puritans for allowing sexual explicit contents, but as J. Cassidy rightly states, the success of the adult video industry demonstrated that in private, a big chunk of the world population is an enthusiast porno consumer.
One would have believed that speculation bubbles would not be here for a few decades to come. But, believe it or not, the bust .com balloon was quickly followed by a new one: real estate.
John Cassidy's lively and thriller like analysis is a must read for all investors and would-be speculators and for all those interested in the history of mankind.
Customer Rating:
Summary: those were the smartest guys in the room
Comment: while the personal computer market built a solid base in the 1980s, it took off in the 1990s with the introduction of windows 95 and the world wide web. The crowd went nuts and soon folks were becoming multi-millionaires with companies that had not much revenue and much greater expenses. Cassidy reports on this very well. even more interesting is his recount of previous market bubbles, many of which are barely remembered by the general public.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Could use some editing, but the message is clear
Comment: I watched the whole dot.com craze from the sidelines 10 years ago when stocks were amazingly overpriced (then just went higher).
Despite some factual errors (which are irrevelant to the basic story - see other reviewer's snipes), this book portrays the reality of the whole dot.com mess. Where to start?
* You've got start-up businesses with no hope of ever making money issuing IPOs and making a fortune. How? Because "analysts" at brokerage firms were telling everyone about the "New Economy" and how everything had changed and "old" pricing models didn't work [...]. Of course, those same brokerage firms made money by selling the stock, so obviously they couldn't be completely trusted.
* You've got the media who fawned over any company with a .com address. Why? Because it sells.
* You've got the fund managers who are afraid of going against the tide and staying away from .com stocks. Why? The risk of being wrong (relative to other fund managers) are FAR more damaging than the benefits of being right.
* You've even got the Fed who signals repeatedly with their comments and monetary policy that stock prices are appropriate. Why? Maybe they were investing as individuals as well and wanted to make more money. Maybe these "experts" didn't know what they were doing.
* Finally, you've got the individual investors who went along for the ride. Why? Because of all the above.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Greed Can Kill!
Comment: During the 1995-2000 period, investing was fun. Everyone was making money.
Like the Dutch tulip frenzy and the pre-1929 Era in the United States, greed overcame common sense. History repeated itself again during the internet craze. The detailed chronicle of the event in the text brought back too many bad memories, especially my investment losses.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Good reference for future speculative bubbles... nice nuggest on Bezos, Greenspan and analysts. Few details on past bubbles...
Comment: After having read many stories about the companies that are mentioned in this book, I appreciated the way the author was able to put things in context, and his in depth research allowed an interesting peek on the human stories that some individuals faces:
From the "lucky punches" (the story of the early PR coverage of amazon.com), to the difficult situation in which Greenspan found himself of either stopping the party or running the risk of letting it go to even higher levels of euphoria, I liked the way in which it provides details on how these people reacted or how they should have felt when they ended in the middle of the biggest speculative bubble that our generation has seen.
The space it devoted to stock analysts left me wanting to read more.. and IMHO the numbers frenzy that the author had providing details just before the crash was unnecessarily long and boring to read.
The book is somewhat old, and hence it misses interesting current phenomena (~Flickr, Youtube, and Google itself) but nonetheless it provides very valuable context on how the dot.com boom speculation happened.. and hopefully readers will get a sense of deja-vu whenever they find themselves in similar circumstances in the future. As I was curious on that area, the space devoted by the author to the dutch tulip bubble and the japan real estate bubble seemed too short.
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