The first thing you'd say about this book is that, however clever the title, it's erroneous: this isn't the story of a "con" at all, it's the story of a speculative bubble.

The whole point is that no-one was "conned" but the punters still bought and bought. There were many psychological and sociological factors at play, but deception was not one of them.

For all that, Dot Con is well researched, well written and entertaining into the bargain (my copy was the paperback second edition in which the typos & manifest errors spotted shattering) had been corrected). Cassidy describes briefly and competently the history of the internet and the general financial environment of the last 50 years, and then takes you into the maelstrom of the bubble from 1995 to 2001, all of which he portrays in suitably stunned-mullet fashion. The new edition features a lengthy epilogue which surveys the wreckage and covers the subsequent inquiry into the practices of investment banking firms and their uneasy relationships with their research analysts, all of which is still very current.

While he doesn't really dwell on it, I think Cassidy would come out in favour of more market regulation and intervention: He's especially critical of the Fed's approach to monetary policy and the atmosphere on the street which led to the boom in the first place.

In some ways (though it's hardly fashionable to say so) the investment banking firms and fund managers were as much victims of this as anyone: while the roof is blowing off the market and the choice is to join in and make hay, or watch your competitors annexing large portions of your market share while you sit on your hands, it is a singular Wall Street firm indeed which chooses to sit the boom out.

In any event this is a thoughtful and well put together book and serves as a pretty good overview of some of the most remarkable times in the history of modern finance.

This should be a book of fiction. I don't know if I can count all the obvious factual errors. Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, has his name wrong. He claims the Altair computer was named after a character in Star Wars. If the Altair computer was invented in 1975, and Star Wars came out in 1977, how was that possible? Duh... The book states: "In 1978, two Chicago students, Randy Seuss and Ward Christensen, invented the modem...."
No they didn't! In 1977, Christensen wrote Xmodem, the first computer program used to transfer files between computers equipped with modems; a year later, he teamed with Seuss to create the first "bulletin board system" software.
Again, Duh....
The CON here is obviously the publisher, Hyberbole, who got conned spelled, misunderstood by the author, grammictally incorrect or just plain false.
To think people are reading this and thinking they are "Learning" something about the internet craze would be like reading a science fiction novel and think you are learning about NASA.

There have been a lot of books about the crash of the high tech market. This is one of the best. The coverage is thorough if at times tedious. Cassidy makes an excellent case that the lack of a business model and the prevalent "greater fool" theory led to the demise of the Internet bubble. Too many pitched the idea that if their site captured just one percent of a [Hundred] billion-dollar market, than the firm would be a success. Only even one percent was a pipe dream, and perhaps a dozen firms had the same idea. And the "greater fool" theory suggests that even if the originators are wrong, somebody else will be foolish enough to buy them out.

Cassidy concludes his good work with a lengthy table of dot.com failures, a sobering story in itself. Perhaps it is so sobering that the life and exhuberance of the subject drained away. I found the last third of the book to be more of a continuous litany of mistakes and I lost much of my interest.