index index index index I watched the whole dot.com craze from the sidelines 10 years ago having [..]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.

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. 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 ), 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.I enjoyed this book. This book is highly recommended as therapy for anyone who went thru the dot com boom and bust and wonders if it is all a dream.Dot.con is a book that reads like a long "New Yorker" article. I view this as a quality, given the subject matter. Despite the size of the ".com" bubble, its explanation is not as elusive as other speculative frenzies (e.g., 1929). The recent speculation is the outcome of "herd behavior" on a massive scale, favored by unique historical conditions, such as the development of a new technology, the liquidity excess in the american markets, and a favorable economic environment. There are plenty of quantitative models and historical studies of such behavior. Cassidy spells out this early (quoting in the process Charles Mackay's seminal treatise), and gets it out of the way. What makes the book interesting is the intricate relationship--and amplification of speculative behavior--among the actors of the bubble: investment banks, venture capitalists, the media, the Federal Bank, entrepreneurs, and finally the american public. Taken individually, the actions of each group may appear greedy, dishonest, stupid. Placed in the proper context however, the judgement is more nuanced. Cassidy shows how the skeptical VCs, financiers and journalists were repeatedly proven wrong in the early stages of the speculation and decreased in number, to the point of extinction. Nowhere is the pressure to imitate the crowds more evident than in Mary Meeker's case, the poster boy of Wall Street hype. Cassidy partially exculpates for her behavior, based on the environment in which she operated. But the examples in the book abound. Noone gets out scot-free, save one or two honest Wall Street stock strategists on the verge of retirement. Cassidy is relatively lenient toward the individual investor, the world of finance, and the entepreneurs: after all, these people had an incentive in feeding the bubble. The author uses his venom for the media and the fed. These are two actor whose role was to inform and vigilate, not to speculate; hence they were failing in their most important role. With all the qualifications of the case, Cassidy heavily criticizes Greenspan, and stigmatizes Wired, CNBC, and Time. His point is well taken, and I would recommend the book because it takes the time and effort to spell out the whys and hows.

A final remark: in my edition (2003, with a post-9/11 afterward) there were very few typos and glaring mistake. For example, Altair was named after a star mentioned in Star Trek, not Star Wars, as mentioned by a reviewer. The early history of the internet is sketchy, but appropriately succint, given that the topic has been eviscerated in thousands of articles and books. On the other side, the events between 1993 and 2001 are covered in detail.

When Vannevar Bush, Franklin D. Roosevelt's chief scientific adviser, sat down in 1945 to write a magazine article about the future, he had no idea what he was beginning. Bush's vision of a desktop computer that would contain all of human knowledge inspired the scientists who built the Internet. In the early 1990s, when a British computer programmer devised the World Wide Web and an Illinois student invented an easy-to-use Web browser, the Internet was transformed from a scientific curiosity into the biggest gold rush since the Klondike.

In Dot.con, John Cassidy, one of the country's leading financial journalists and a staff writer at the New Yorker, relates the stories of Netscape, Yahoo!, America Online, , and other Internet companies, large and small. In a lively and entertaining narrative, Cassidy traces the rise of Internet stocks and the development of a populist stock market culture to the end of the Cold War. He shows how an unscrupulous alliance of entrepreneurs such as Jeff Bezos, venture capitalists such as John Doerr, stock analysts such as Mary Meeker, and investment bankers such as Frank Quattrone helped turn an exciting technological development into an unstable and dangerous speculative bubble.

Cassidy doesn't restrict his attention to Silicon Valley and Wall Street. He demonstrates how many prominent journalists and policy makers helped to expand and prolong the bubble, particularly Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Federal Reserve.

But in the end, Cassidy concludes, responsibility for the Internet boom and bust cannot be placed on any one individual. It was a nationwide epizootic that involved tens of millions of Americans. And now that it is over, the country as a whole is paying a heavy price for succumbing to greed and wishful thinking. An artful blend of storytelling, history, and economics, Dot.con provides the first complete and authoritative account of the biggest financial story of the modern era.John Cassidy’s Dot.con is the most sweeping and definitive assessment published thus far of the stock market mania that swept this country in the late 1990s. Cassidy, who covers economics and finance for The New Yorker, finds many seeds for the boom: Vannevar Bush’s “memex” machine, the “intellectual forerunner of the World Wide Web”; increasing popularity of 401(k)s and IRAs, which introduced millions of Americans to the equity markets, giving rise to a “stock market culture"; and the attention and hype in the late '80s and early '90s surrounding the “information superhighway” promoted by the likes of Al Gore, Newt Gingrich, and Nicholas Negroponte. When Netscape went public in 1995, 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. For anyone who got caught up in the mania and foundered in its eventual crash, Dot.con is a bittersweet trip down memory lane that Cassidy captures just perfectly. Highly recommended. --Harry C. Edwards suria review reviews analysis analyze