ComputingFailure.com: War Stories from the Electronic Revolution (Hardcover)

Summary

Learn the lessons of today's worst software and e-Business failures!

Understanding why software projects fail is the best way to make sure yours succeeds and the dotcom boom and bust teaches powerful new lessons every manager and developer must heed. Now, Robert Glass, the world's #1 expert on software project failure, has brought together dozens of the latest computer disasters on and off the Web.

These are stories ripped from the latest headlines, each annotated with practical pointers for reducing your own software risk. You'll find failures of strategy, technology, business models, leadership, partnership, and much more—all with one thing in common. You can learn from them. And you'd better!

Detailed insights into nearly 40 failures, including...

• Pets.com
• Wingspan Bank
• Toysmart
• Interval
• ValueAmerica
• Mortgage.com
• Boo.com
• Netscape
• AtomicPop
• TheBigStore
• Inacom
• Pandesic
• And more...

Looking back, it was a time of madness: an era when billions of dollars—and even more faith—was placed in dotcom startups with inexperienced management and "Swiss cheese" business plans. Robert Glass's ComputingFailure.com is a powerful chronicle of those years, and something more: a cautionary "worst practices" guide for every entrepreneur and e-business professional.

Glass carefully chooses his case studies for the insights they impart. The executives quoted and profiled in this book have learned hard, expensive lessons—about building compelling business models, about managing growth, and about when to ignore the venture capitalists. They've learned surprising lessons about integrating with bricks-and-mortar parent companies and about what it takes to get marketing, tech, and everyone else on the same page.

And they've learned these lessons in the most vivid, unforgettable way possible: by failing.

Don't assume these causes and signs of failure apply only to dotcoms. They can affect virtually every new company—as well as many established companies ramping up e-Business and e-Commerce initiatives. But if you know about these mistakes, you're far less likely to make them. One book gets you to the heart of Web-enabled failure, and returns you safely to the "land of the living": ComputingFailure.com.

From the Foreword:

"Today, you need to positively flirt with failure to achieve meaningful success. You need to become an expert on failure. That's where Bob Glass's long and careful study of project failure mechanisms comes in. In ComputingFailure.com, he sets out for you a series of failure scenarios anchored in real and recent fact. Read them and profit from them."

—Tom DeMarco, author of Peopleware