How extremely satisfying to see these smug, self-centered, stuck-up snobs utterly discredited and crash and burn into obscurity. The shame is that they devastated so many people and reputations in the process. I enjoyed this book immensely, as mean as I might sound in saying that. Maybe it's my own personal history that caused me to feel such animosity towards them, but screw them, I'm glad they failed. And everyone else like them. Before I knew this book existed, I knew the story. Back in the early to mid 90's, I was working for a brick-and-mortar business that was eager to stretch into online retail, waaaaaay before that was common. Back when you had to hire a team of programmers to actually write the code for your shopping program, when security was a truly nebulous concept, back when everyone was on dial-up and consumers were paying for their internet by the MINUTE, so you had to have fast-loading pages and easy to use sites. The company I worked for, that I was personally and financially invested in, used its own money and budgeted this programming and efforts as it could afford to. And in the meantime, those of us involved in the expansion worked many, many, many late hours and often overnight trying to understand the code, testing, finding problems, trying to solve them on our own since programmers were so expensive. If you were in business at the time, you can remember the very strange stories that kept floating around about these "new millionaires" ... these kids, most of them between the ages of 18 and 25, who were suddenly freakishly wealthy and lived in gated comminities, threw lavish parties, jet-setted around the world in Gulfstream jets, and lived the high life ... and how did they do it? Internet millions. Those of us who were were working at it, trying desperately to make the difficult parts of internet commerce work, were skeptical. Skeptical did not begin to describe it. Our crap detectors were pegged out on "WTF" full time. I can remember one really late night that became an early morning, and a coworker was sifting through our unread mail, and there was a magazine (Fortune, I'm pretty sure) with a pair of nose-in-the-air nattily dressed European twenty-somethings, with the title hailing them as geniuses, the ushers of the new era in commerce. We just kept asking each other, HOW ARE THEY DOING THIS? Taking some time away from our relentless task at hand, we read the article. Guess what? They weren't doing anything. They had no product. Their website had not "launched" yet, and in fact missed deadline after deadline. The money was not earned, it had been given to them, based on nothing but a demo they would show on one of their personal laptops. Meaning ... the crap they were selling did not work, and would not work. They were selling an idea, and people were giving them hundreds of millions of dollars to do it. And even with all the money in the world being thrown at them from the biggest financial names you can name, they couldn't make it work. After launching a clumsy, inferior, bug-filled website, that did not do what the demo did, they closed up shop. This story was burned into my brain because I lived the opposite track ... no one gave us anything, we used our own money, we only posted things when they worked, we didn't promise anything to anyone, and we are still here and these weenies are the poster children for failure. I had no idea this book existed until I saw it in a used bookstore, but I have remembered the Fortune magazine cover ever since I saw it that day about 15 years ago. And now and then I'd run into that co-worker and one of the topics of conversation between us is always "How's the website going? Hey remember those snots on the cover of Fortune magazine? Ever seen or heard from them since?" And no, I had long forgotten their names, and hadn't heard about them since. So, to read the book about how hard they failed and what fools they made of themselves was oddly comforting, as if to provide just a little bit of reassurance that justice may seem slow at times, but it'll getcha somehow. I have no idea if this book was a success or made any money for those wanna-bes, I hope if it did, they understood this to be a far more honest way to make money then the junk they tried to pull. I bought it at a used bookstore and I passed it on to someone else for free, so they have received none of my money. The book is long, very detailed, I mean very detailed, but if you are at all interested in this subject, you will not find any more complete record of the "internet millions" and what it all really meant than this. Thank you for this book, thank you for the closure, thank you for validating what I believed all along, thank you for proving me right, thank you for being deluded fools and total failures, thank you for taking a big ol' bite of the sh*t sandwich that was fed to the many who were tricked into funding you. Thank you.

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