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& DESIGN Home Page Architecture Brand Equity Auto Design Game Room SMALLBIZ Smart Answers Success Stories Today's Tip INVESTING Investing: Europe Annual Reports BW 50 S&P Picks & Pans Stock Screeners Free S&P Stock Report SCOREBOARDS Hot Growth 100 Mutual Funds Info Tech 100 S&P 500 B-SCHOOLS Undergrad Programs MBA Blogs MBA Profiles MBA Rankings Who's Hiring Grads | | APRIL 12, 2002 BOOK REVIEW Dead.com F'd Companies: Spectacular Dot-Com Flameouts By Philip J. Kaplan Simon & Schuster -- 191pp -- $18
Never one to shy away from the spotlight (he has been profiled by The New York Times, Salon.com, and ABC News's 20/20), Kaplan has expanded his franchise with F'd Companies: Spectacular Dot-Com Flameouts. Here, he offers capsule descriptions of about 150 of the wackiest ideas or biggest implosions. Kaplan lays out exactly how many millions the companies burned through and gives, in sometimes clever and often crude language, his sarcastic explanation for why they failed. CASUALTIES EVERYWHERE. As the über-insider of the dot-com meltdown, Kaplan has plenty of material to work with. His Web site's betting pool assigns high scores to those submitting the best information about coming dot-com catastrophes. (There are no payouts -- winning is its own reward.) So employees send often venomous e-mails to F**kedcompany.com, reporting rumors of pending layoffs, shutdowns, and bankruptcies. As more companies went under, sick fascination with the site became contagious, its notoriety spread, and postings from disgruntled employees snowballed. Because the information so often turned out to be accurate, reading the postings afforded the uncanny sensation of watching a car wreck in slow motion -- or more precisely, an expressway pileup stretching for miles and miles. The book trains a searchlight on the wreckage of companies from Webvan to sports site MVP.com -- and reveals their shoddy underpinnings. Consider Kaplan's riff on startup Third Voice: "I've heard a lot of ridiculous dot-com ideas and business plans but this one was so inane that when I first heard of it, it actually pissed me off. Third Voice was a free little browser plug-in you could download that would enable you to put virtual 'sticky notes' on Web sites.It was supposed to make the Web more interactive. Being the hooligan that I am, it seemed to me right away that the only practical application for such technology was to vandalize other Web sites. It sucked -- especially if you were one of the investors who pumped $15 million into this toy." LATE FOR THE WAKE. Kaplan admits he knew little about the financial complexities of these outfits. But F'd Companies is an improvement over Kaplan's site in that it distills a lot of information while maintaining the mocking, satirical tone. In the end, reading F'd Companies is a little like picking a scab that has nearly healed. Kaplan had a moment in time, but that moment was about nine months ago. By now, everyone and his Pets.com puppet has chimed in on how stupid the whole craze was. F'd Companies might have found a place as a vicious little catalog of the dead and gone if the ground hadn't been covered by so many other books already.  By Heather Green Get BusinessWeek directly on your desktop with our RSS feeds.  Add BusinessWeek news to your Web site with our headline feed. Click to buy an e-print or reprint of a BusinessWeek or BusinessWeek Online story or video. To subscribe online to BusinessWeek magazine, please click here. Learn more, go to the BusinessWeekOnline home page  | | APRIL |
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