I don't know about cheering _all_ dot-com failures, but it's pleasant to see eToys.com getting kicked in the ass, I guess. About a year ago, eToys.com sued an internet-art group, etoy, claiming that etoy diminished the value of eToys.com's trademark. Someone looking for Pokemon goods might have typed in "www.etoy.com" instead of "www.etoys.com," got confused by all that abstract stuff, and driven to Toys-R-Us instead, thus causing eToys.com to lose potential profits, which God and the courts forbid. eToys.com's lawyers also argued that etoy's mock "stock shares" constituted security fraud, which is about as sensible as having the manufacturers of the board game Monopoly arrested for counterfeiting currency.
At the moment of the lawsuit, etoy was yet another bunch of starving artists, while eToys.com had a bubblicious stock value of something like seven billion dollars - I guess investors were hoping that millions of shoppers were about to buy lots of Christmas presents on line that year. Just in time for the Xmas shopping season, eToys.com won in court, too; for a while, etoy's web site was shut down by an injunction. The punch line is that etoy had owned and used that domain name for several years before eToys.com ever started up. But the management of eToys.com figured that with all their lawyers and all their IPO money, they could bulldoze etoy and steal their domain name.
Probably each of these crafty eToys.com execs squirreled away a couple million for backup before the enterprise fell apart, and I bet the lawyers all got paid up front. Most likely, the people getting the shock here are the abruptly unemployed $20K/year workers at the eToys.com "fulfillment center" who now have, what, two weeks? a month? to come up with another job so they can feed the kids and keep ahead of the bills.
Yours WDK - WKiernan at concentric.net