G. Beato’s post mortem for Verde is good for a few laughs. All of these stories seem to include a villainous consulting firm that blows up the naive company and runts off with its money — in this case the villain is Scient. I don’t usually mine nuggets from the articles I link to, but this one was too good to pass up:

In addition, Scient betrayed little knowledge of the media business, even though they were acting as “strategists” for a media site. For example, Scient’s team kept asking when they could get all the copy for the site — 6 weeks before launch? 8 weeks? When a Verde employee held up a copy of The Wall Street Journal and asked them when they thought the printers had gotten all the copy for that issue, they answered, ‘At least a few weeks ago.’ When the Verde team pointed out that much of the news in the issue hadn’t happened until the day before, the Scient team was “dumbfounded.”