Customer Reviews

F'd Companies: Spectacular Dot-com Flameouts

5 star:		(36)
4 star:		(23)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(14)
1 star:		(26)

 

 

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.

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.

This is basically a text dump of a bunch of stuff you can get on the website anyway... it is not a particularly good read, either. Stay away.

Kaplan's acerbic, concise analysis of failed dotcom business plans is often brilliant, and right on track. However, due to the worst editing you will ever see, the book is chocc-full of infantile, gratuitous swearing and sexual allusions.It's as painful and tedious to sit through as any movie made by MTV's Tom Green. Kaplan's firtst maturbation joke was not funny; neither was the 20th, or any in between. Humorous swearing is an art - think of Chris Rock - but Kaplan is no artist. His swearing is childish, excessive, obnoxious and pathetic.

A good editor would have spent the weekend removing 95% of the swearing, and all of the sophomoric sexual nonsense, and put in a chapter on how Enron lost $1 billion on brokering broadband and Video-on-Demand. The result would have been a legitimate book.

It's a shame that Kaplan's book won't play in flyover country. I would love to see Mr. Kaplan dishing dirt with the likes of Maria Bartoromo, Ron Insana and other dotcom hucksters on network tv. But the raunchy-yet-unfunny nature of this book will keep him out of the mainstream. That's a pity, because Kaplan does have something to say.

It appears as if the author through together tidbits from his website postings and wrote this book in an hour or two.

He offers little-to-no insight regarding the demise of these companies.

The book is also full of incorrect information (Paul Allen does not own the Seattle Sonics, he owns the Portland Trailblazers, Fizzylab was not an ecommerce company...)

If you must read.. read in the book store and toss it on your way out.

Don't expect King Lear here. This book is so bad that the fact that it is selling well scares me. Are we as Americans really that stupid or are we just a country of skate board riding baboons?

Avoid this book! It is written by the someone profoundly intent on making money on cheese and sleaze. Don't look for any vestiges of class here. In 10 years America will be well into the slippery slope down to ignorance and apathy.

This book is as played out as the website. Pud's bitter resentment for the dot com sector was interesting for a few days a year ago, but now it seems old and tired. Everyone knows about the dot com thang. I thought at least this book would offer some interesting insights, but no. Played out.

If you have been to the web site that spawned this book, you've had access to all this book has to offer. There is no new insight, no new research, no significant details about any of the companies listed, and apparently nobody felt the need to clean up any of the prose. If you are expecting any sort of analysis of any of the companies, you won't find it here. This book is purely anecdotal.

Still, that said, bits of this book can be humorous. I couldn't read it straight through, but you can pick it up at any page and find yet another story of somebody who thought banner ads would fund their silly idea.

I love the website and love Pud's view of the world. Many times he has suceeded in stating exactly what everyone has been thinking but he says it in a way that really makes you laugh (and think). This book however, seems like a mash of the website-so if you didn't follow the site and the dailys, this book is for you. If you are a fan of the site-just beware-you may feel you've read this all before.

As an aside-Pud's column after the 9/11 attacks was one of the best written by anyone anywhere and worth a re-print someplace.

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.