Dot.con: The Greatest Story Ever Sold (互联网经济：非理性的繁荣)

When Vannevar Bush, Franklin D. Roosevelt's chief scientific adviser, sat down in 1945 to write a magazine article about the future, he had no idea what he was beginning. Bush's vision of a desktop computer that would contain all of human knowledge inspired the scientists who built the Internet. In the early 1990s, when a British computer programmer devised the World Wide Web and an Illinois student invented an easy-to-use Web browser, the Internet was transformed from a scientific curiosity into the biggest gold rush since the Klondike.
　　In Dot.con, John Cassidy, one of the country's leading financial journalists and a staff writer at the New Yorker, relates the stories of Netscape, Yahoo!, America Online, Amazon.com, and other Internet companies, large and small. In a lively and entertaining narrative, Cassidy traces the rise of Internet stocks and the development of a populist stock market culture to the end of the Cold War. He shows how an unscrupulous alliance of entrepreneurs such as Jeff Bezos, venture capitalists such as John Doerr, stock analysts such as Mary Meeker, and investment bankers such as Frank Quattrone helped turn an exciting technological development into an unstable and dangerous speculative bubble.
　　Cassidy doesn't restrict his attention to Silicon Valley and Wall Street. He demonstrates how many prominent journalists and policy makers helped to expand and prolong the bubble, particularly Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Federal Reserve.
　　But in the end, Cassidy concludes, responsibility for the Internet boom and bust cannot be placed on any one individual. It was a nationwide epizootic that involved tens of millions of Americans. And now that it is over, the country as a whole is paying a heavy price for succumbing to greed and wishful thinking. An artful blend of storytelling, history, and economics, Dot.con provides the first complete and authoritative account of the biggest financial story of the modern era.

Amazon.com

John Cassidy’s Dot.con is the most sweeping and definitive assessment published thus far of the stock market mania that swept this country in the late 1990s. Cassidy, who covers economics and finance for The New Yorker, finds many seeds for the boom: Vannevar Bush’s “memex” machine, the “intellectual forerunner of the World Wide Web”; increasing popularity of 401(k)s and IRAs, which introduced millions of Americans to the equity markets, giving rise to a “stock market culture"; and the attention and hype in the late '80s and early '90s surrounding the “information superhighway” promoted by the likes of Al Gore, Newt Gingrich, and Nicholas Negroponte. When Netscape went public in 1995, the Internet mania began a five-year run that was fueled in part by the media, the policies promoted by Alan Greenspan and the Federal Reserve, the rise of day trading, and the deluge of IPOs brought to market by firms such as Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch and their analyst cheerleaders Mary Meeker and Henry Blodget. For anyone who got caught up in the mania and foundered in its eventual crash, Dot.con is a bittersweet trip down memory lane that Cassidy captures just perfectly. Highly recommended.
　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　--Harry C. Edwards

From Publishers Weekly

This book's epigraph, "Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?" (by Johnny Rotten), perfectly sets the tone for what follows. Cassidy certainly knows he was cheated by the collapse of Internet stocks, and here he sets out to discover who's to blame. His search includes a history of the stock market (starting in ancient Rome) and finds that most buying manias and speculative bubbles were encouraged by unscrupulous financial professionals. He traces the Internet to Vannevar Bush's work during World War II. Its developers "tended to be young men with long greasy hair, thick glasses, and an obsessive interest in science fiction," who were held in contempt by the rest of the world. But Cassidy, an economics writer at the New Yorker, goes beyond these usual suspects of stock brokers and computer geeks. He devotes two chapters to criticizing Alan Greenspan for making "frequent references to the benefits of new technology," among other things. The author indicts many additional public figures, journalists, analysts, authors and businesspeople by name and finds them guilty. Despite the sensational charges, there is little new here. It's hard to believe that anyone will be shocked to learn that most Internet companies and day traders lost money or that venture capitalists, investment bankers and stock analysts made large fees promoting stocks without subjecting the companies in question to critical scrutiny. Cassidy does not even deliver an entertaining rant. Most of the pages are uninspired chronicles of well-known events. Agents, Andrew Wylie and Jeffrey Posternak. (Feb.)Forecast: The large number of people who lost money in Internet stocks will be predisposed to accept this book's premise. The fair-minded ones will want a better analysis; the angry ones will want more dirt or passion.

prologue
chapter 1 From memex to world wide web
chapter 2 popular capitalism
chapter 3 information superhighway
chapter 4 netscape
chapter 5 the stock market
chapter 6 ipo
chapter 7 yahoo!
chapter 8 battle for the’net
chapter 9 irrational exuberance
chapter 10 amazon．corn
chapter 11 the new economy
chapter 12 a media bubble
chapter 13 greenspan’S green light
chapter 14 euphoria
chapter 15 queen of the’net
chapter 16 trading nation
chapter 17 web dreams
chapter 18 warning signs
chapter 19 the Fed stHkes
chapter 20 crash
chapter 21 dead dotcoms
epilogue
notes
appendix
index