Product Description

When Britain got dot.com fever at the very end of the 20th century the City tore up the rule book. Lastminute.com soared to a stock-market valuation of 3750 million. Clickmango.com raised millions in days. Boo.com spent #100 million trying to sell designer sports gear on the Net. Old-style industrial giants with huge turnovers and workforces were edged out of the FTSE 100 by e-commerce newcomers losing a fortune. And then it all went horribly wrong, and even the most glamorous start-ups found they couldn't defy the laws of gravity. Rory Cellan-Jones was the BBC's Internet Correspondent throughout the whole dot.com bubble (now it no longer has a dedicated Internet Correspondent at all), and was thus uniquely placed to cover the whole story at first-hand, from the first fledgling net pioneers and the launch of Freeserve through the fabulous fin-de-siecle spending of boo.com to the horribly messy crash that with hindsight seemed utterly inevitable. Originally published as current affairs, "Dot.bomb" - with the story brough up to date for this 2003 edition - now stands as both a business manual of how not to start a business, and a work of recent history.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #155693 in Books
• Published on: 2003-08-21
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Review
'At times hilarious... captures perfectly the greed, conceit and plain stupidity of the time' - Daily Telegraph

Management Today
Absorbing...a painstaking exhumation of the stock market's latest bout of irrational exuberance.

Times Higher Education Supplement
Dot.Bomb is entertaining, allowing readers to enjoy the rollercoaster ride without getting bogged down in technicalities.

Customer Reviews

Excellent, well written insiders guide to dot com Britian
Cellan-Jones spins a compelling yarn of the heady days of boom and bust in the British internet business. He's met all the people and introduces the us to them. At the end of the book you feel as if you've attended the First Tuesday meetings, sat in on the pitches to Venture Capitalists, been to the launch parties and seen the debt collectors march in.

A brilliant book, with few failings.
This is a great book. Most of this genre is heavily based on the American experience, this book is firmly set in Britain!

With a classic reads like a novel style, the author goes way beyond simply quoting the press releases of the dotcoms. He has a genuine understanding of what went on and there are classic quotes from naïve company founders, dry software engineers, and frazzled marketers (the fur flys as the protagonists dish out blame and settle scores.)

There are also great supporting characters, all well researched and developed. They include the E-commerce pioneers, the VC's, Investment Banks, Analysts, Retail Investors, Media, and even the Man In The Street, all get time centre stage.

If you did participate in the dotcom goldrush you will enjoy this book. Even if you didn't it's still a good read for anyone interested in the revolution that promised so much, but who's real effect we won't know for some time.

Well written cautionary tale
There are, perhaps, two books that need to be read in conjunction with dot.bomb - Po Bronson's "The Nudist on the Late Shift" and "The Future Just Happened" by Michael Lewis. Both Bronson and Lewis tackle other parts of the new economy. Bronson's is a terrific gallup through the world of Silicon Valley, capturing its zeitgeist perfectly. Lewis is more reflective, more amazed by what happened and more philosophical about the outcome - not for him the endless stories of IPOs and bright twenty-somethings becoming very rich (although he has a few of those); instead he concentrates on the social impact of the Net.

Cellan-Jones, meanwhile, looks at both angles and, refreshingly, from a Anglocentric viewpoint. He writes very well, considering both the incredible amounts of money made in those nine months and the impact that it had on the old economy, whilst remaining sceptical about its lasting importance. He notes - uniquely in these three books, I think - that the new economy did not embrace all sections of the community, that it was not the great leveller that had been promised. Those that made money in the UK were all from establishment backgrounds - Brent Hoberman and Martha Lane Fox of lastminute.com were Oxford graduates (Lane Fox's father being a don); Clickmango was founded by Tiny Rowland's son, Toby; and so on. Old money - or what passed for it in the old economy - begat money in the new economy. Even the tales of young Internet start-ups - Tom Hadfield of Soccernet, Benjamin Cohen of jewish.net - are brought back to earth with Cellan-Jones effortlessly readable prose.

This book is the tale of a moment when the UK's business leaders (and their financiers) lost their mind. Cellan-Jones has narrated their story with a detached enthusiasm, trying to discover what caused the aboration and what it really achieved. He's played his hand well: too much one way and the book would be star struck; too much the other, and it would be relentlessly cynical. He manages to strike a sensible balance.

A good book; highly recommended. But read Bronson and Lewis as well.