Dot.Bomb: The Inside Story of the First Dot.Com Crash by David Kuo
ValueAmerica.com was supposed to do for e-commerce what Wal-Mart did for retail - blow the competition out of the water. Entire multinational retail corporations were supposed to fall to the ultimate one-stop-shop on the web. Led by Craig Winn, a true marketing genius, the company was a dot-com pioneer backed by power players like Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and FedEx chairman Fred Smith. But it didn't happen. In less than a year the share price had crashed and the company had haemorrhaged over $200 million. This is the inside story of e-commerce's greatest debacle to date - a cautionary tale of corporate over-reaching.