Digital Capital: Harnessing the Power of Business Webs.

• Author: Marshall, Jeffrey
• Position: Review

By Don Tapscott, David Ticoll and Alex Lowy. Harvard Business School Press, 272 pages. $27.50.

Any book with a section devoted to "the molecularization of human capital" might seem a bit abstruse. But fear not: Digital Capital confines itself chiefly to an examination of business Web strategies and their implications, and provides a very useful framework for understanding business models that are still evolving.

The authors, who form the senior management group at the Alliance for Converging Technologies, posit five distinct models for Web businesses: Agoras, Aggregators, Value Chains, Alliances and Distributive Networks. They analyze each in depth, using examples drawn from such New Economy firms as eBay, Webvan, priceline.com, Cisco and Linux. Flow charts -- some quite complex -- show how various...