Customer Reviews

ComputingFailure.com: War Stories from the Electronic Revolution

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The editor (or, more accurately, compiler) of this volume is honest about how he put it together: He clipped interesting stories about unsuccessful dot.com companies and slipped them into a file. When the file was thick enough, he arranged the stories more or less topically, padded them with his file of recent non-dot.com "computer failure" articles, obtained reprint permissions and, voila!, produced a book (or, more accurately, a "book").

The stories are grouped into chapters, and between the chapters comes the editor's intellectual contribution, consisting mostly of jejune observations that we have all seen or thought before.

If you read The Wall Street Journal and The Industry Standard, you have already read most of this book, and the parts that you haven't read are of marginal interest. On the positive side, the articles are interesting, even though their moral is generally one that was old when Charles Dow was knee-high to a debenture: Don't throw money into an enterprise that you don't understand.

And the moral of this review is: Throw money at this book if you want a permanent anthology of schadenfreude. Otherwise, you got some bucks to invest? Right here I have the Next Great Thing. . . .

I really like Robert Glass's computer books of which I've read several, but despite the title, this is NOT a computer book. This is a compilation of news reports of dot-com BUSINESS failures. There is nothing about computers in the book, except that the businesses used them. The blurb on the back of the book talks about "why software projects fail" but there is virtually nothing in the book on projects or software. Also the format is useful for illustrating ideas (for a good example see Epstein's The Case of the Killer Robot) but here there is nothing for them to illustrate - this is nothing but news reports.

I was expecting something more like Neumann's Computer-Related Risks.

I have to admit I was drawn by the book's very provocative title, so I decided to browse through it today, to find that it is a very nice compilation of stories printed with permission, taken from publications such as the Wall Street Journal, The Industry Standard, Barron's and Time Digital.

This is not to say that the content of the stories was bad at all. On the contrary, all of these publications are highly respectable, but if you have been a close follower of the whole dot.com shakedown process over the course of the past year and a half, and expect to find insights that will allow you to better understand the underlying reasons for it, you might be dissapointed not to find any "new" ones in this book.

In short, in my opinion, the book does not add significantly to the whole discussion about the topic.