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Rating: 
Summary: UNDER THE WIRE
Review: A lot of us -- and I must include myself to some extent -- were dazzled by all that apparent growth. I always thought that there was a lot of hype out there, but never saw the complete train wreck coming. From Malik's book it sounds like Gilder didn't either, and -- it seems to me -- that as the wreck was approaching he was screaming "full steam ahead." It's too bad really, because in the end some of Gilder's predictions about wasting bandwidth may well turn out to be prescient. But as that famous quote from Keynes said, "In the long run we're all dead." What the industry really needs as a replacement to Gilder is someone more like an Old Testament prophet -- that is someone who can at the same time chastise and point specifically to the right path. (Gilder was more of a psalmist -- singing praises to the Lord and making us all feel good about ourselves.) I think our new prophet is also going to have to talk a lot less about raw growth and a lot more about where value is actually to be found.
Rating: 
Summary: An OC-3 dose of human greed searching for technowealth
Review: Be it the robber barrons of the railroad age or the techno age, their MO is the same. Hype the potential of rapid growth and fabulous wealth to employees, investors, lenders, and regulators while you carve out your personal wealth and build your mansions. Flagler did it in Florida and Ebbers did it Mississippi. Fast Eddie W. is doing it at SBC in Texas and hoodwinking all as the PSTN infrastructure is being fast eclipsed by the Chamber like pioneers at Cisco with VOIP networks. I made it my goal in reading this book to focus on telecom pioneers such as my Illinois native telecom hero, Jack Goeken, who took on the Goliaths at AT&T. I was happy to see that the author balanced out the book by talking about Jack. There is still plenty of room for the telecom Horatio Algers to make a substantial and lasting impact in helping the masses of the world to better communicate and bring us all a little closer together. Search these people out ... go to work for them ... invest in them ... read about them ... get inspired about them. We are out there!
Rating:
Summary: Broadbandits is on target
Review: I lived through the Telecom mess and am happy to say that this author got it right. He spotlights the major villains and clearly details their shenanigans adding touches of humor in the right places. Read it and you'll know what caused the telecom mess, who was responsible and why they did it. You'll laugh out loud in a couple of places and quietly shake your head in digust in other parts of the book. It is a great read.
Rating:
Summary: Highly Recommended!
Review: If you've even glanced at your retirement account balance or brokerage statement in the past few years, you no doubt have felt the effects of the broadband bubble. Less publicized than the tech wreck of 2000, the broadband meltdown was every bit as costly. Journalist Om Malik gathers the varied tales of telecom shenanigans anddf then adds up the stock sales so you can see just how much the broadbandits took. Malik's engaging and vitriolic writing style is fun to read, and he makes the intriguing assertion that the telecoms outdid the dot-coms in terms of sheer greed and gall. We suggest this book to any investor who hopes not to get burned, and to any executive responsible for safeguarding shareholder value.
Rating: 
Summary: How the great telecom bubble grew and finally burst
Review: It was the best of times (money flowed like water), it was the worst of times (in retrospect, for those who didn't cash out at or near the top). It was a great human drama, and unlike Dickens, it was all 100% nonfiction - it really did happen. For anyone in the telecom industry who lived through the bubble, and now the depression, for anyone who invested in the telecom bubble, or for anyone curious about one of the greatest financial manias in human history, I recommend Broadbandits. Broadbandits profiles most of the key individuals and companies who helped inflate (and in many cases profit from) the telecom bubble, at a steady one company per chapter pace. Being in the telecom industry myself (still), I can state that Malik accurately captured the major stories I already knew, so I assume the rest of the book is generally factual. Although Malik focuses most of his anger on company bigwigs, he also admits that a bubble the size of this one could not have been created without active, willing participation from all sectors of the community: greedy disconnected CEOs, conflicted Wall Street and industry analysts, small investors who wanted to double their money overnight, and a unique confluence of regulatory and technological changes and advances. Broadbandits could have been better. Malik's principle sources are business press articles, and he has a fascination with documenting dollar figures, so he doesn't probe as deeply as he could into the reasons behind the actions he reports. The book was written hurriedly (to keep it topical), and there are more than a few data errors. Malik correctly cites Ravi Suria's seminal report on the debt and finances of telecom firms, which proved how the emperor of telecom stocks had no clothes (I remember almost crying for joy when I originally read Suria's report), but he missed Jeremy Siegel's equally important bubble bursting op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal proving that Cisco and other high P/E stocks were way overvalued and that we were experiencing another "Nifty Fifty" tech mania episode. Finally, to return to my Dickens reference, the book would be even more dramatic if it recounted more anecdotal stories and statistics of the small investors and employees who lost their money, retirement savings and jobs, to provide contrast to the well-documented stories of folks who cleared many millions during the boom. However, I do admit that with the title of Broadbandits, the focus is on the bigwigs who inflated and profited from the bubble. One more minor quibble: two of the people who praise Broadbandits on the back cover are thanked by Malik in his Acknowledgements. Conflicts of interest are everywhere! And just what did Malik do during his brief stint as a venture capitalist?
Rating:
Summary: How the great telecom bubble grew and finally burst
Review: It was the best of times (money flowed like water), it was the worst of times (in retrospect, for those who didn't cash out at or near the top). It was a great human drama, and unlike Dickens, it was all 100% nonfiction - it really did happen. For anyone in the telecom industry who lived through the bubble, and now the depression, for anyone who invested in the telecom bubble, or for anyone curious about one of the greatest financial manias in human history, I recommend Broadbandits. Broadbandits profiles most of the key individuals and companies who helped inflate (and in many cases profit from) the telecom bubble, at a steady one company per chapter pace. Being in the telecom industry myself (still), I can state that Malik accurately captured the major stories I already knew, so I assume the rest of the book is generally factual. Although Malik focuses most of his anger on company bigwigs, he also admits that a bubble the size of this one could not have been created without active, willing participation from all sectors of the community: greedy disconnected CEOs, conflicted Wall Street and industry analysts, small investors who wanted to double their money overnight, and a unique confluence of regulatory and technological changes and advances. Broadbandits could have been better. Malik's principle sources are business press articles, and he has a fascination with documenting dollar figures, so he doesn't probe as deeply as he could into the reasons behind the actions he reports. The book was written hurriedly (to keep it topical), and there are more than a few data errors. Malik correctly cites Ravi Suria's seminal report on the debt and finances of telecom firms, which proved how the emperor of telecom stocks had no clothes (I remember almost crying for joy when I originally read Suria's report), but he missed Jeremy Siegel's equally important bubble bursting op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal proving that Cisco and other high P/E stocks were way overvalued and that we were experiencing another "Nifty Fifty" tech mania episode. Finally, to return to my Dickens reference, the book would be even more dramatic if it recounted more anecdotal stories and statistics of the small investors and employees who lost their money, retirement savings and jobs, to provide contrast to the well-documented stories of folks who cleared many millions during the boom. However, I do admit that with the title of Broadbandits, the focus is on the bigwigs who inflated and profited from the bubble. One more minor quibble: two of the people who praise Broadbandits on the back cover are thanked by Malik in his Acknowledgements. Conflicts of interest are everywhere! And just what did Malik do during his brief stint as a venture capitalist?
Rating:
Summary: Like Reading Your Obituary in Living Color
Review: This is a good read for those who want to know how cycles come and go in the economic world and how those in the right place at the right time with shaky ethics and/or poor strategic skills can get filthy rich. The sheer stupidity of investors, bankers and "yes men" employees is stagering and worth the price of the book just for this alone.
Rating:
Summary: Broadbandits
Review: Though much of the financial carnage associated with the companies chronicled in Broadbandits is well documented, I found Om Malik's coverage of the human element and motives involved to be both fascinating and illuminating.
His timing on publishing this book could not be better, given the backdrop of ongoing investigations and legal action against many of the companies or principals he writes about. I find it ironic that a number of these "visionaries" and "promoters" who were paid like kings because they were supposedly so invaluable to their companies or firms, now use as a defense that they really didn't know what was going on in their companies. It is amazing people like Bernie Ebbers who made literally hundreds, if not thousands, of presentations to knowledgeable investors, who ask insightful questions, could now make this claim. Also, where are the other research analysts on Wall Street. It is one thing for Grubman to be an active co-conspirator, but where was the independent research that should have debunked these charlatans before they got started. The easiest myth to debunk of all is the myth that the Internet was growing 100% every four months over a sustainable period and press releases that claimed dial port consumption was increaseing 10% per month. Any reasonably asstute person could do the calculations on this and realize that there are not enough people or information to sustain this growth rate for more than a fleeting moment. In a matter of a couple of years everyone in the US would have had to have been signed onto an individual dial port twenty-four hours a day. Om Malik makes it clear how phony these arguments are and how dishonest and disingenuous they are. Future generations will look back on this much as we look back at the Tulip Bubble in Holland and wonder how did anybody ever believe any of this. This is a great first book for Om Malik.
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