F'd Companies: Spectacular Dot-Com Flameouts

Features

• Cover Type: Hard Cover with 208 pages
• Published by: Simon & Schuster
• Edition: 1st Edition April 2002
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0743228626
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0743228626
• Book Dimensions: 7.5 x 5.3 x 0.8 inches
• Weighs: 10.4 ounces

Product Review
The graveyard of dot-com disasters is overflowing with grandiose ideas gone spectacularly bad, and Philip J. Kaplan's F'd Companies offers an unapologetically acerbic opinion on dozens of the most outrageous. Kaplan, a programmer turned consultant whose own online dreams began when he launched a bulletin board system for pirated game software back in 1989, pulls no punches as he bluntly dissects Web failures that remain dazzling for their pretentious plans and audacious executions. There are big names like Webvan ("a classic example of PAYING more for products than they were SELLING them for") and Go.com (a "portal to nowhere"), but most here are less well known despite similarly burning through cash like a cyber-brushfire. In language far more explicit than his softened-for-the-bookstore title, Kaplan skewers the likes of Iam.com (which lost $48 million trying to convince models and actors to post their portfolios on the Net), OnlineChoice.com (which spent $20 million to learn consumers weren't interested in group buys of electricity and other utilities), HeavenlyDoor.com (which sunk $26 million into a site peddling caskets and burial plots), and Eppraisals.com (which dropped $15 million on an effort to sell online evaluations of antiques). The result is consistently profane, frequently hilarious, and usually right on target. --Howard Rothman

From Publishers Weekly
"I'm a computer programmer," Kaplan writes. "I'm that dude at your office in the dark cubicle who nobody listens or pays attention to (especially the hotties in marketing)." Kaplan's claim to fame is FuckedCompany.com, a Web site he built over Memorial Day weekend in 2000 to serve as a forum for terrible news about Internet companies. His timing a few months after the Internet bubble began to deflate was perfect, and FuckedCompany became an immediate hit. Thousands of fired or about-to-be-fired dot-commers were more than willing to share their horror stories about the collapse of one Internet company after another. He has translated the material posted on the site into a book, offering brief vignettes of the demise of more than 150 Internet ventures. His basic formula includes a description of what the company purported to do (Mercata.com "customers would use the site to band together and purchase merchandise at wholesale prices"), how much money it blew through before going bankrupt and how many people were fired ("$89 million and 100 employees were burned"). Kaplan, 25, attempts to enliven each story with humor, which is often more crude than clever. That many of the stories sound the same is not Kaplan's fault, as most really are: someone comes up with an idea, finds a venture capitalist willing to pour funding into the company despite the flimsiest of business plans, and then goes broke when the money dries up. Although he tries, Kaplan delivers little more than an elegy for the Industry Standard, Pets.com, Contentville.com, Flooz.com, Bid.com and Kozmo.com, not to mention Zing.com, ProcessTree.com and MetalSpectrum.com.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Reader Reviews
This review is from: F'd Companies: Spectacular Dot-Com Flameouts (Hardcover) 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. Comment | | (Report this)