Out of the Box: Strategies for Achieving Profits Today and Growth Tomorrow Through Web Services.

• Author: Marshall, Jeffrey
• Position: Bookshelf

Out of the box: strategies for achieving profits today and growth tomorrow through web services.

By John Hagel 3rd. Harvard Business School Press, 217 pages. $29.95.

Many a dot-com is dead and buried, but author John Hagel isn't writing about them. His focus in this relatively short but densely packed book is how the Web is enabling traditional companies to broaden their range of services more cheaply, more flexibly and with considerably less risk than what they faced with previous waves of information technology.

Web services architecture, Hagel writes, isn't focused on connecting people with Web sites, but "on connecting applications and data directly with each other, automating connections that might otherwise have required human intervention." A particular advantage, he says, is "loose coupling," which means that resources "can be accessed across multiple entities and diverse technology platforms."

In many ways, this is an optimistic book...