E’s a mystery Picture yourself hanging ten in the famed surf of Hawaii, enjoying a day of better-than-average waves, just having a totally tubular time. Now, imagine that the reason for the high surf is an incoming tropical storm and you missed the forecast this morning.

If that scenario seems gnawingly familiar, you’re probably one of millions of people all over this Web-woven world trying to make sense of the Internet’s impact on how we do business. For many, using the World Wide Web is not about carefree surfing any more. It’s about survival in an increasingly merciless electronic commerce (or e-commerce ) marketplace.

Our featured new books this month deal with the anxiety that corporate managers, employees, and entrepreneurs are all feeling as they come to terms with the necessity of mastering e-commerce and other online competencies. At enterprises of all sizes in all industries, hallways are abuzz with nervous conversations about the huge opportunities waiting to be exploited on the Web and about the harsh blows that competition will deal to those who fail to exploit it properly.

It’s inevitable that books about Web business would abound while it’s a hot topic. But one new title stands out as the most lucidly argued of any I have seen, with the broadest relevance to a wide range of business situations: Dead Ahead: The Web Dilemma and the New Rules of Business, by Laurie Windham with Jon Samsel.

This is a book about real life, at a time when businesses are being forced into making high-stakes commitments to an evolving paradigm. I know from firsthand experience how baffling, frustrating, and even frightening it can be to decide how and where a company will make its early Web investments. It’s easy to tell that the rules of business are indeed new, but it can be vexing to figure out how they apply in one’s own case.

Windham, a San Francisco consultant, cuts to the core issues that business strategists need to focus on after they get past the initial acceptance of the Web as an inevitable part of their future. Windham guides the reader toward an understanding of how the Web reshapes nearly every aspect of business, from management structure to the most basic marketing premises to the new ways companies must approach their capital needs in the wired world and beyond. Dead Ahead is a first-rate prop to bolster the confidence of reluctant cybernauts.

Jonathan Ezor takes on many of the same issues in Clicking Through: A Survival Guide for Bringing Your Company Online (Bloomberg Press, $19.95, 1576600734). Offering an attorney’s perspective but also an entrepreneur’s mind-set, lawyer and columnist Ezor sets out a primer to help small businesses cope with the dangers inherent in Web-based business.

Those risks, as he makes clear, are both legal and tactical. It’s as easy to infringe someone else’s copyright inadvertently online as it is for someone else to poach your own. There’s a world’s worth of law and regulation that even a well-meaning Web site can transgress. Questions can arise about just who owns the material your company pays Web developers to create. The devil lurks in the details of contracts with technology vendors such as Web hosts, and the other party to the contract may be the only one with a full knowledge of those details. Ezor provides sound counsel on what questions to ask and what points really matter in negotiating with all the parties involved in weaving a Web presence.

Clicking Through is about opportunity as well as risk. But its warnings and suggestions concerning the things that can go wrong in e-business are sobering words of wisdom for companies about to fly enthusiastically into the enticing Web. This book will empower businesses to manage their online risks intelligently so that they can pursue online opportunities without fear of the unknown.

In The E-Commerce Book: Building the E-Empire (Academic Press, $39.95, 0124211607), authors Steffano Korper and Juanita Ellis convey a deep understanding of Internet applications in business. That’s hardly a surprise, since these information technology experts and educators have been working at the cutting edge of online business since the very Stone Age of the World Wide Web way back in 1994.

Would-be e-emperors will find this guide to empire-building as comprehensive as they could possibly hope for and will find plenty of inspiration as well. Lest anyone doubt the vigor of the Web marketplace, the authors sketch out its potential in terms that will convert all doubters. Maybe the figure of $2.2 trillion in worldwide e-commerce activity by 2003 is just too large to digest, so let’s look at some smaller numbers from the book. Number of years it took for use of the automobile to spread to one quarter of the population: 55. For the telephone: 35 years. For the Internet: 7 years. Message delivered: This new medium is catching on at lightning speed, and if your company doesn’t reach its customers through the Web, your competitors will.

Korper and Ellis approach e-commerce from a technologist’s point of view though, as the books mentioned above make clear, online business makes techies of everyone in the office, stripping the old high priests from the MIS department of much of their mystical power, but also leaving behind anyone who fails to master the basics of Internet technologies. It’s fortunate that these writers have a gift for gently acquainting the intimidated novice with the rapidly evolving tech phenomena that may well shape his or her future, from XML language to EDI connectivity to asymmetric key encryption.

Despite its attention to high-tech topics, The E-Commerce Book is a big-picture view of the Web’s brave new world. For any business leader trying to get e-commerce right the first time, this title will be an indispensable resource.

Our fourth book doesn’t present itself as another work about the Internet, but the very fact that Web applications are so central to its strategic vision makes it an important volume for business people coming to grips with the new online economy. Steven Wheeler and Evan Hirsch, authors of Channel Champions: How Leading Companies Build New Strategies to Serve Customers (Jossey-Bass, $35, 0787950343), are consultants with Booz-Allen and Hamilton, who cast a laser focus on one of the ultimate goals of all business efforts, online and otherwise: building a connection with the people who buy a company’s products and services.

Channel Champions is the book to pick up in the quiet moments of the morning before you boot up and begin your hectic online business day. Its core premise is refreshingly simple: Good businesses build good channels and tend them with loving care. A channel is simply a means of reaching the customer. Channels, Wheeler and Hirsch argue, have always been with us; a 5-and-10 store is (or was) one form of channel, a big-box superstore is another, and a virtual store that exists only online is another.

Obviously, channels are changing these days. Unintended consequences can result. Channels that worked for the decade preceding last Thursday may not work come Tuesday. The Web channel can fail to reach key customers, and it can eat into traditional sales channels. The authors guide the reader through these shoals by showing how the world’s best companies have channeled successfully how Wilsonart built a distributor network that delivers on its promise to deliver kitchen counters within ten days to anywhere in the U.S., how Saturn sells a transportation service to beat out rivals who just sell cars, how Dell dominates personal computer sales by selling directly to customers.

Briefly noted: Michael Lewis, of Liar’s Poker fame, has written the most engaging and dramatic business book of the year: The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story (W.W. Norton, $25.95, 0393048136; Nova Audio Books, $17.95, 1567408567). Lewis plays Boswell to one of the wild sages of our era, Netscape founder Jim Clark, intrepidly riding along as the entrepreneur tries to launch a health care technology company and the world’s most computerized yacht simultaneously.

U.C.L.A. Professor Richard Rosecrance surveys the increasingly integrated global economy in The Rise of the Virtual State: Wealth and Power in the Coming Century (Basic Books, $26, 0465071414). Rosecrance draws analogies from the experiences of great and lesser national powers, going back hundreds of years to buttress his argument that we are literally on the verge of entering a new world: a universe where traditional measures of national might have no meaning and where a country’s most valuable resources are often the least tangible ones.

The Biology of Business: Decoding the Natural Laws of Enterprise (Jossey-Bass, $28.50, 078794324X) presents a radical new management theory, set out in essays by editor John H. Clippinger and nine other contributors. Borrowing principles from scientific thinking, the authors postulate a thought-provoking new approach to running organizations as complex adaptive systems. Journalist E. Thomas Wood is an editor with the Champs-Elysees.com family of European language-and-culture products.

E’s a mystery Picture yourself hanging ten in the famed surf of Hawaii, enjoying a day of better-than-average waves, just having a totally tubular time. Now, imagine that the reason for the high surf is an incoming tropical storm and you missed the forecast this morning.

E’s a mystery Picture yourself hanging ten in the famed surf of Hawaii, enjoying a day of better-than-average waves, just having a totally tubular time. Now, imagine that the reason for the high surf is an incoming tropical storm and you missed the forecast this morning.

If that scenario seems gnawingly familiar, you’re probably one of millions of people all over this Web-woven world trying to make sense of the Internet’s impact on how we do business. For many, using the World Wide Web is not about carefree surfing any more. It’s about survival in an increasingly merciless electronic commerce (or e-commerce ) marketplace.

Our featured new books this month deal with the anxiety that corporate managers, employees, and entrepreneurs are all feeling as they come to terms with the necessity of mastering e-commerce and other online competencies. At enterprises of all sizes in all industries, hallways are abuzz with nervous conversations about the huge opportunities waiting to be exploited on the Web and about the harsh blows that competition will deal to those who fail to exploit it properly.

It’s inevitable that books about Web business would abound while it’s a hot topic. But one new title stands out as the most lucidly argued of any I have seen, with the broadest relevance to a wide range of business situations: Dead Ahead: The Web Dilemma and the New Rules of Business (Allworth Press, $24.95, 1581150334), by Laurie Windham with Jon Samsel.

This is a book about real life, at a time when businesses are being forced into making high-stakes commitments to an evolving paradigm. I know from firsthand experience how baffling, frustrating, and even frightening it can be to decide how and where a company will make its early Web investments. It’s easy to tell that the rules of business are indeed new, but it can be vexing to figure out how they apply in one’s own case.

Windham, a San Francisco consultant, cuts to the core issues that business strategists need to focus on after they get past the initial acceptance of the Web as an inevitable part of their future. Windham guides the reader toward an understanding of how the Web reshapes nearly every aspect of business, from management structure to the most basic marketing premises to the new ways companies must approach their capital needs in the wired world and beyond. Dead Ahead is a first-rate prop to bolster the confidence of reluctant cybernauts.

Jonathan Ezor takes on many of the same issues in Clicking Through: A Survival Guide for Bringing Your Company Online (Bloomberg Press, $19.95, 1576600734). Offering an attorney’s perspective but also an entrepreneur’s mind-set, lawyer and columnist Ezor sets out a primer to help small businesses cope with the dangers inherent in Web-based business.

Those risks, as he makes clear, are both legal and tactical. It’s as easy to infringe someone else’s copyright inadvertently online as it is for someone else to poach your own. There’s a world’s worth of law and regulation that even a well-meaning Web site can transgress. Questions can arise about just who owns the material your company pays Web developers to create. The devil lurks in the details of contracts with technology vendors such as Web hosts, and the other party to the contract may be the only one with a full knowledge of those details. Ezor provides sound counsel on what questions to ask and what points really matter in negotiating with all the parties involved in weaving a Web presence.

Clicking Through is about opportunity as well as risk. But its warnings and suggestions concerning the things that can go wrong in e-business are sobering words of wisdom for companies about to fly enthusiastically into the enticing Web. This book will empower businesses to manage their online risks intelligently so that they can pursue online opportunities without fear of the unknown.

In The E-Commerce Book: Building the E-Empire, authors Steffano Korper and Juanita Ellis convey a deep understanding of Internet applications in business. That’s hardly a surprise, since these information technology experts and educators have been working at the cutting edge of online business since the very Stone Age of the World Wide Web way back in 1994.

Would-be e-emperors will find this guide to empire-building as comprehensive as they could possibly hope for and will find plenty of inspiration as well. Lest anyone doubt the vigor of the Web marketplace, the authors sketch out its potential in terms that will convert all doubters. Maybe the figure of $2.2 trillion in worldwide e-commerce activity by 2003 is just too large to digest, so let’s look at some smaller numbers from the book. Number of years it took for use of the automobile to spread to one quarter of the population: 55. For the telephone: 35 years. For the Internet: 7 years. Message delivered: This new medium is catching on at lightning speed, and if your company doesn’t reach its customers through the Web, your competitors will.

Korper and Ellis approach e-commerce from a technologist’s point of view though, as the books mentioned above make clear, online business makes techies of everyone in the office, stripping the old high priests from the MIS department of much of their mystical power, but also leaving behind anyone who fails to master the basics of Internet technologies. It’s fortunate that these writers have a gift for gently acquainting the intimidated novice with the rapidly evolving tech phenomena that may well shape his or her future, from XML language to EDI connectivity to asymmetric key encryption.

Despite its attention to high-tech topics, The E-Commerce Book is a big-picture view of the Web’s brave new world. For any business leader trying to get e-commerce right the first time, this title will be an indispensable resource.

Our fourth book doesn’t present itself as another work about the Internet, but the very fact that Web applications are so central to its strategic vision makes it an important volume for business people coming to grips with the new online economy. Steven Wheeler and Evan Hirsch, authors of Channel Champions: How Leading Companies Build New Strategies to Serve Customers (Jossey-Bass, $35, 0787950343), are consultants with Booz-Allen and Hamilton, who cast a laser focus on one of the ultimate goals of all business efforts, online and otherwise: building a connection with the people who buy a company’s products and services.

Channel Champions is the book to pick up in the quiet moments of the morning before you boot up and begin your hectic online business day. Its core premise is refreshingly simple: Good businesses build good channels and tend them with loving care. A channel is simply a means of reaching the customer. Channels, Wheeler and Hirsch argue, have always been with us; a 5-and-10 store is (or was) one form of channel, a big-box superstore is another, and a virtual store that exists only online is another.

Obviously, channels are changing these days. Unintended consequences can result. Channels that worked for the decade preceding last Thursday may not work come Tuesday. The Web channel can fail to reach key customers, and it can eat into traditional sales channels. The authors guide the reader through these shoals by showing how the world’s best companies have channeled successfully how Wilsonart built a distributor network that delivers on its promise to deliver kitchen counters within ten days to anywhere in the U.S., how Saturn sells a transportation service to beat out rivals who just sell cars, how Dell dominates personal computer sales by selling directly to customers.

Briefly noted: Michael Lewis, of Liar’s Poker fame, has written the most engaging and dramatic business book of the year: The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story (W.

W. Norton, $25.95, 0393048136; Nova Audio Books, $17.95, 1567408567). Lewis plays Boswell to one of the wild sages of our era, Netscape founder Jim Clark, intrepidly riding along as the entrepreneur tries to launch a health care technology company and the world’s most computerized yacht simultaneously.

U.C.L.A. Professor Richard Rosecrance surveys the increasingly integrated global economy in The Rise of the Virtual State: Wealth and Power in the Coming Century (Basic Books, $26, 0465071414). Rosecrance draws analogies from the experiences of great and lesser national powers, going back hundreds of years to buttress his argument that we are literally on the verge of entering a new world: a universe where traditional measures of national might have no meaning and where a country’s most valuable resources are often the least tangible ones.

The Biology of Business: Decoding the Natural Laws of Enterprise (Jossey-Bass, $28.50, 078794324X) presents a radical new management theory, set out in essays by editor John H. Clippinger and nine other contributors. Borrowing principles from scientific thinking, the authors postulate a thought-provoking new approach to running organizations as complex adaptive systems. Journalist E. Thomas Wood is an editor with the Champs-Elysees.com family of European language-and-culture products.

E’s a mystery Picture yourself hanging ten in the famed surf of Hawaii, enjoying a day of better-than-average waves, just having a totally tubular time. Now, imagine that the reason for the high surf is an incoming tropical storm and you missed the forecast this morning.

If that scenario seems gnawingly familiar, you’re probably one of millions of people all over this Web-woven world trying to make sense of the Internet’s impact on how we do business. For many, using the World Wide Web is not about carefree surfing any more. It’s about survival in an increasingly merciless electronic commerce (or e-commerce ) marketplace.

Our featured new books this month deal with the anxiety that corporate managers, employees, and entrepreneurs are all feeling as they come to terms with the necessity of mastering e-commerce and other online competencies. At enterprises of all sizes in all industries, hallways are abuzz with nervous conversations about the huge opportunities waiting to be exploited on the Web and about the harsh blows that competition will deal to those who fail to exploit it properly.

It’s inevitable that books about Web business would abound while it’s a hot topic. But one new title stands out as the most lucidly argued of any I have seen, with the broadest relevance to a wide range of business situations: Dead Ahead: The Web Dilemma and the New Rules of Business (Allworth Press, $24.95, 1581150334), by Laurie Windham with Jon Samsel.

This is a book about real life, at a time when businesses are being forced into making high-stakes commitments to an evolving paradigm. I know from firsthand experience how baffling, frustrating, and even frightening it can be to decide how and where a company will make its early Web investments. It’s easy to tell that the rules of business are indeed new, but it can be vexing to figure out how they apply in one’s own case.

Windham, a San Francisco consultant, cuts to the core issues that business strategists need to focus on after they get past the initial acceptance of the Web as an inevitable part of their future. Windham guides the reader toward an understanding of how the Web reshapes nearly every aspect of business, from management structure to the most basic marketing premises to the new ways companies must approach their capital needs in the wired world and beyond. Dead Ahead is a first-rate prop to bolster the confidence of reluctant cybernauts.

Jonathan Ezor takes on many of the same issues in Clicking Through: A Survival Guide for Bringing Your Company Online (Bloomberg Press, $19.95, 1576600734). Offering an attorney’s perspective but also an entrepreneur’s mind-set, lawyer and columnist Ezor sets out a primer to help small businesses cope with the dangers inherent in Web-based business.

Those risks, as he makes clear, are both legal and tactical. It’s as easy to infringe someone else’s copyright inadvertently online as it is for someone else to poach your own. There’s a world’s worth of law and regulation that even a well-meaning Web site can transgress. Questions can arise about just who owns the material your company pays Web developers to create. The devil lurks in the details of contracts with technology vendors such as Web hosts, and the other party to the contract may be the only one with a full knowledge of those details. Ezor provides sound counsel on what questions to ask and what points really matter in negotiating with all the parties involved in weaving a Web presence.

Clicking Through is about opportunity as well as risk. But its warnings and suggestions concerning the things that can go wrong in e-business are sobering words of wisdom for companies about to fly enthusiastically into the enticing Web. This book will empower businesses to manage their online risks intelligently so that they can pursue online opportunities without fear of the unknown.

In The E-Commerce Book: Building the E-Empire (Academic Press, $39.95, 0124211607), authors Steffano Korper and Juanita Ellis convey a deep understanding of Internet applications in business. That’s hardly a surprise, since these information technology experts and educators have been working at the cutting edge of online business since the very Stone Age of the World Wide Web way back in 1994.

Would-be e-emperors will find this guide to empire-building as comprehensive as they could possibly hope for and will find plenty of inspiration as well. Lest anyone doubt the vigor of the Web marketplace, the authors sketch out its potential in terms that will convert all doubters. Maybe the figure of $2.2 trillion in worldwide e-commerce activity by 2003 is just too large to digest, so let’s look at some smaller numbers from the book. Number of years it took for use of the automobile to spread to one quarter of the population: 55. For the telephone: 35 years. For the Internet: 7 years. Message delivered: This new medium is catching on at lightning speed, and if your company doesn’t reach its customers through the Web, your competitors will.

Korper and Ellis approach e-commerce from a technologist’s point of view though, as the books mentioned above make clear, online business makes techies of everyone in the office, stripping the old high priests from the MIS department of much of their mystical power, but also leaving behind anyone who fails to master the basics of Internet technologies. It’s fortunate that these writers have a gift for gently acquainting the intimidated novice with the rapidly evolving tech phenomena that may well shape his or her future, from XML language to EDI connectivity to asymmetric key encryption.

Despite its attention to high-tech topics, The E-Commerce Book is a big-picture view of the Web’s brave new world. For any business leader trying to get e-commerce right the first time, this title will be an indispensable resource.

Our fourth book doesn’t present itself as another work about the Internet, but the very fact that Web applications are so central to its strategic vision makes it an important volume for business people coming to grips with the new online economy. Steven Wheeler and Evan Hirsch, authors of Channel Champions: How Leading Companies Build New Strategies to Serve Customers (Jossey-Bass, $35, 0787950343), are consultants with Booz-Allen and Hamilton, who cast a laser focus on one of the ultimate goals of all business efforts, online and otherwise: building a connection with the people who buy a company’s products and services.

Channel Champions is the book to pick up in the quiet moments of the morning before you boot up and begin your hectic online business day. Its core premise is refreshingly simple: Good businesses build good channels and tend them with loving care. A channel is simply a means of reaching the customer. Channels, Wheeler and Hirsch argue, have always been with us; a 5-and-10 store is (or was) one form of channel, a big-box superstore is another, and a virtual store that exists only online is another.

Obviously, channels are changing these days. Unintended consequences can result. Channels that worked for the decade preceding last Thursday may not work come Tuesday. The Web channel can fail to reach key customers, and it can eat into traditional sales channels. The authors guide the reader through these shoals by showing how the world’s best companies have channeled successfully how Wilsonart built a distributor network that delivers on its promise to deliver kitchen counters within ten days to anywhere in the U.

S., how Saturn sells a transportation service to beat out rivals who just sell cars, how Dell dominates personal computer sales by selling directly to customers.

Briefly noted: Michael Lewis, of Liar’s Poker fame, has written the most engaging and dramatic business book of the year: The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story (Nova Audio Books, $17.95, 1567408567). Lewis plays Boswell to one of the wild sages of our era, Netscape founder Jim Clark, intrepidly riding along as the entrepreneur tries to launch a health care technology company and the world’s most computerized yacht simultaneously.

U.C.L.A. Professor Richard Rosecrance surveys the increasingly integrated global economy in The Rise of the Virtual State: Wealth and Power in the Coming Century (Basic Books, $26, 0465071414). Rosecrance draws analogies from the experiences of great and lesser national powers, going back hundreds of years to buttress his argument that we are literally on the verge of entering a new world: a universe where traditional measures of national might have no meaning and where a country’s most valuable resources are often the least tangible ones.

The Biology of Business: Decoding the Natural Laws of Enterprise (Jossey-Bass, $28.50, 078794324X) presents a radical new management theory, set out in essays by editor John H. Clippinger and nine other contributors. Borrowing principles from scientific thinking, the authors postulate a thought-provoking new approach to running organizations as complex adaptive systems. Journalist E. Thomas Wood is an editor with the Champs-Elysees.com family of European language-and-culture products.

Beyond nerd chic We are all nerds now. Or maybe there are no nerds anymore. One way or the other, technology has reached the masses in the past two decades. This sense that humanity’s relationship with technology is attaining a certain maturity seems to permeate a crop of recent books that cover the past, present, and future of high-tech industries.

Case in point: Folks can launch their own satellites now. One of the most inspiring business books of the past year tells how a little company full of big ideas, Virginia-based Orbital Sciences Corp., got into the business of putting commercial satellites into space. In Silicon Sky: How One Small Start-Up Went Over the Top to Beat the Big Boys into Satellite Heaven, author Gary Dorsey chronicles the progress of a pipe dream as it has evolved into a company with 1998 revenues of $734 million.

Orbital founder David Thompson gave Dorsey unfettered access to the company’s inner workings from the beginning of its efforts to design a commercially viable communications satellite in 1992 through the first launch in 1995. The author clearly identifies with Thompson’s entrepreneurial ardor, contrasting Orbital’s culture of discovery with the feudal, unimaginative culture of old-line aerospace companies addicted to government contracts.

What Dorsey lacks in objectivity, he makes up for in clarity. From his fly-on-the-wall perch, sitting in on company meetings and peering over the shoulders of workers in the lab, he has observed and distilled into concise prose the details that made Orbital’s success possible. Dorsey explains the technology behind the business so fluidly that it hardly seems like rocket science.

If Orbital’s story offers inspiration, another new book offers exactly the opposite. When you see an airplane crashing from a clear blue sky, you just have to watch. When you encounter one of the great triumph-to-disaster stories in the history of American business the rise and fall of Apple Computer Inc. you just have to read on.

Michael S. Malone’s Infinite Loop: How The World’s Most Insanely Great Computer Company Went Insane (Currency/Doubleday, $27.50, 0385486847) is the stuff of a corporate horror movie, replete with moments of terrible Scooby-Doo inevitability. Apple founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak might as well be the teenaged couple wandering through the spooky factory, about to pry open the icebox door to see what’s making the noise inside. You want to put hands over eyes and scream: Wozniak, no! Don’t give away blocks of your founders’ stock to 30 buddies on a whim! Jobs, no! Don’t shoot down CEO John Sculley’s idea of making the Macintosh IBM-compatible! This is the tale of a company that had it all and blew it. Early in the personal computer age, Apple had superior technology on its side. Its customers displayed fanatical product loyalty. Its young founders became instant archetypes of the creative energy that made U.S. high-tech industries the envy of the world. But Jobs and Wozniak achieved too much too early in life. Success thoroughly ruined their magic and nearly ruined the company.

Malone tries to cut through the Silicon Valley mythology that now surrounds the company’s beginnings in the garage of Jobs’s Santa Clara, California home, and he makes a special effort to recognize key players in its first years who have not shared the limelight since. Malone was an insider for part of Apple’s early journey and covered the company as a journalist at other times. He brings to this account an authority and an evident big-picture understanding that lay to rest any conflict-of-interest concerns. Still, his disgust with Steve Jobs fairly oozes from these pages. There is a grudging tone to his rather passing acknowledgment that a more grown-up Jobs (now a wise old man of 43) has presided over quite a turnaround at Apple since he engineered a boardroom coup and returned to the helm in 1997. The book went to press in October 1998, just as the new iMac line of PCs had begun to rack up some of Apple’s best sales in years. Since then the numbers have made a Merlin of Jobs once more. Apple’s profits are way up, and the company said in April that it had doubled its share of the retail desktop market over the past year.

In The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity (Macmillan Computer Publishing, $25, 0672316498), Alan Cooper has a message for fellow technologists: Get human.

A much-lauded software author and designer, Cooper sets out in this book to make the business case for interaction design. Interaction design is a lofty-sounding term for what ought to be an obvious concept: making things (such as computer software and hardware) that people can easily use.

Such a simple truth has eluded Silicon Valley’s best minds, in Cooper’s view. And he says it doesn’t have to be that way. Designers don’t have to make guinea pigs out of customers, rolling out half-baked versions of computer products and then relying on users’ complaints as the basis to tweak subsequent editions.

Cooper’s book is a plea for technology’s high priests to meet the masses halfway. Sure, people in business must come to terms with bits and bytes, he argues but those who turn ones and zeroes into screen icons need to do a much better job of focusing on the needs of computer users.

Inmates’ main audience is the general business reader, for whom the book is a glimpse at how the technologists do their thing and how they could do it better, making the lives of computer users easier and making companies that depend on technology more successful.

Cooper offers an alternative to the Microsoft way of doing things. In fact, Bill Gates makes a case against interaction design in Business @ The Speed of Thought: Using a Digital Nervous System (written with Collins Hemingway; Warner Books, $30, 0446525685; Little Brown, Abridged, $24.98, 1570427526; Time Warner Audio, Unabridged, $49.98, 1570427534). You’re usually better off tackling smaller processes and building on them, Gates argues, and then improv[ing] the solution as you get user feedback. To many of the millions who work with Microsoft products every day, user feedback sounds like a euphemism for the anguished squawks emitted when a program performs an illegal operation and shuts itself down, or when that annoying little paperclip guy pops up on screen to ask whether you know how to write a letter.

But the Microsoft way is here to stay, and, on balance, that may be a good thing. More than anyone else, Gates has brought computer technology into the everyday lives of people the world over. One can politely debate him, as Cooper does, or hate him but not ignore him. He is the Alpha Nerd.

Business @ The Speed of Thought lays out Gates’s vision of the near future in worldwide business and society. His underlying message: You ain’t seen nothin’ yet. For all the productivity gains registered by businesses in the past decade through the skillful deployment of technology, the hot-wired organizations of the 21st century hold the promise of even greater progress. The book is full of real-world examples of companies whose digital nervous systems are making them more efficient and profitable by improving the flow of information among decision-makers at all levels.

Not all of these systems are necessarily produced by Microsoft. Gates uses his company’s inner workings to show the processes that go into digitizing a business, but he also candidly discusses Microsoft’s, and his own, failures of strategic vision in the past most notably its tardiness in embracing the internet’s potential.

Gates makes a persuasive argument that technology can be a liberating force. In businesses, improved digital information systems can empower employees to move beyond carrying out orders and take more initiative on their own. Beyond business in education, government, and elsewhere in society the same systems can benefit the common good.

Nashville journalist E. Thomas Wood is the author of Karski: How One Man Tried to Stop the Holocaust (Wiley).

We are all nerds now. Or maybe there are no nerds anymore. One way or the other, technology has reached the masses in the past two decades. This sense that humanity’s relationship with technology is attaining a certain maturity seems to permeate a crop of recent books that cover the past, present, and future of high-tech industries.

Case in point: Folks can launch their own satellites now. One of the most inspiring business books of the past year tells how a little company full of big ideas, Virginia-based Orbital Sciences Corp., got into the business of putting commercial satellites into space. In Silicon Sky: How One Small Start-Up Went Over the Top to Beat the Big Boys into Satellite Heaven (Perseus Books, $26, 0738200948), author Gary Dorsey chronicles the progress of a pipe dream as it has evolved into a company with 1998 revenues of $734 million.

Orbital founder David Thompson gave Dorsey unfettered access to the company’s inner workings from the beginning of its efforts to design a commercially viable communications satellite in 1992 through the first launch in 1995. The author clearly identifies with Thompson’s entrepreneurial ardor, contrasting Orbital’s culture of discovery with the feudal, unimaginative culture of old-line aerospace companies addicted to government contracts.

What Dorsey lacks in objectivity, he makes up for in clarity. From his fly-on-the-wall perch, sitting in on company meetings and peering over the shoulders of workers in the lab, he has observed and distilled into concise prose the details that made Orbital’s success possible. Dorsey explains the technology behind the business so fluidly that it hardly seems like rocket science.

If Orbital’s story offers inspiration, another new book offers exactly the opposite. When you see an airplane crashing from a clear blue sky, you just have to watch. When you encounter one of the great triumph-to-disaster stories in the history of American business the rise and fall of Apple Computer Inc. you just have to read on.

Michael S. Malone’s Infinite Loop: How The World’s Most Insanely Great Computer Company Went Insane is the stuff of a corporate horror movie, replete with moments of terrible Scooby-Doo inevitability. Apple founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak might as well be the teenaged couple wandering through the spooky factory, about to pry open the icebox door to see what’s making the noise inside. You want to put hands over eyes and scream: Wozniak, no! Don’t give away blocks of your founders’ stock to 30 buddies on a whim! Jobs, no! Don’t shoot down CEO John Sculley’s idea of making the Macintosh IBM-compatible! This is the tale of a company that had it all and blew it. Early in the personal computer age, Apple had superior technology on its side. Its customers displayed fanatical product loyalty. Its young founders became instant archetypes of the creative energy that made U.

S. high-tech industries the envy of the world. But Jobs and Wozniak achieved too much too early in life. Success thoroughly ruined their magic and nearly ruined the company.

Malone tries to cut through the Silicon Valley mythology that now surrounds the company’s beginnings in the garage of Jobs’s Santa Clara, California home, and he makes a special effort to recognize key players in its first years who have not shared the limelight since. Malone was an insider for part of Apple’s early journey and covered the company as a journalist at other times. He brings to this account an authority and an evident big-picture understanding that lay to rest any conflict-of-interest concerns. Still, his disgust with Steve Jobs fairly oozes from these pages. There is a grudging tone to his rather passing acknowledgment that a more grown-up Jobs (now a wise old man of 43) has presided over quite a turnaround at Apple since he engineered a boardroom coup and returned to the helm in 1997. The book went to press in October 1998, just as the new iMac line of PCs had begun to rack up some of Apple’s best sales in years. Since then the numbers have made a Merlin of Jobs once more. Apple’s profits are way up, and the company said in April that it had doubled its share of the retail desktop market over the past year.

In The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity (Macmillan Computer Publishing, $25, 0672316498), Alan Cooper has a message for fellow technologists: Get human.

A much-lauded software author and designer, Cooper sets out in this book to make the business case for interaction design. Interaction design is a lofty-sounding term for what ought to be an obvious concept: making things (such as computer software and hardware) that people can easily use.

Such a simple truth has eluded Silicon Valley’s best minds, in Cooper’s view. And he says it doesn’t have to be that way. Designers don’t have to make guinea pigs out of customers, rolling out half-baked versions of computer products and then relying on users’ complaints as the basis to tweak subsequent editions.

Cooper’s book is a plea for technology’s high priests to meet the masses halfway. Sure, people in business must come to terms with bits and bytes, he argues but those who turn ones and zeroes into screen icons need to do a much better job of focusing on the needs of computer users.

Inmates’ main audience is the general business reader, for whom the book is a glimpse at how the technologists do their thing and how they could do it better, making the lives of computer users easier and making companies that depend on technology more successful.

Cooper offers an alternative to the Microsoft way of doing things. In fact, Bill Gates makes a case against interaction design in Business @ The Speed of Thought: Using a Digital Nervous System (written with Collins Hemingway; Warner Books, $30, 0446525685; Little Brown, Abridged, $24.98, 1570427526; Time Warner Audio, Unabridged, $49.98, 1570427534). You’re usually better off tackling smaller processes and building on them, Gates argues, and then improv[ing] the solution as you get user feedback. To many of the millions who work with Microsoft products every day, user feedback sounds like a euphemism for the anguished squawks emitted when a program performs an illegal operation and shuts itself down, or when that annoying little paperclip guy pops up on screen to ask whether you know how to write a letter.

But the Microsoft way is here to stay, and, on balance, that may be a good thing. More than anyone else, Gates has brought computer technology into the everyday lives of people the world over. One can politely debate him, as Cooper does, or hate him but not ignore him. He is the Alpha Nerd.

Business @ The Speed of Thought lays out Gates’s vision of the near future in worldwide business and society. His underlying message: You ain’t seen nothin’ yet. For all the productivity gains registered by businesses in the past decade through the skillful deployment of technology, the hot-wired organizations of the 21st century hold the promise of even greater progress. The book is full of real-world examples of companies whose digital nervous systems are making them more efficient and profitable by improving the flow of information among decision-makers at all levels.

Not all of these systems are necessarily produced by Microsoft. Gates uses his company’s inner workings to show the processes that go into digitizing a business, but he also candidly discusses Microsoft’s, and his own, failures of strategic vision in the past most notably its tardiness in embracing the internet’s potential.

Gates makes a persuasive argument that technology can be a liberating force. In businesses, improved digital information systems can empower employees to move beyond carrying out orders and take more initiative on their own. Beyond business in education, government, and elsewhere in society the same systems can benefit the common good.

Nashville journalist E. Thomas Wood is the author of Karski: How One Man Tried to Stop the Holocaust (Wiley).

Beyond nerd chic We are all nerds now. Or maybe there are no nerds anymore. One way or the other, technology has reached the masses in the past two decades. This sense that humanity’s relationship with technology is attaining a certain maturity seems to permeate a crop of recent books that cover the past, present, and future of high-tech industries.

Case in point: Folks can launch their own satellites now. One of the most inspiring business books of the past year tells how a little company full of big ideas, Virginia-based Orbital Sciences Corp., got into the business of putting commercial satellites into space. In Silicon Sky: How One Small Start-Up Went Over the Top to Beat the Big Boys into Satellite Heaven (Perseus Books, $26, 0738200948), author Gary Dorsey chronicles the progress of a pipe dream as it has evolved into a company with 1998 revenues of $734 million.

Orbital founder David Thompson gave Dorsey unfettered access to the company’s inner workings from the beginning of its efforts to design a commercially viable communications satellite in 1992 through the first launch in 1995. The author clearly identifies with Thompson’s entrepreneurial ardor, contrasting Orbital’s culture of discovery with the feudal, unimaginative culture of old-line aerospace companies addicted to government contracts.

What Dorsey lacks in objectivity, he makes up for in clarity. From his fly-on-the-wall perch, sitting in on company meetings and peering over the shoulders of workers in the lab, he has observed and distilled into concise prose the details that made Orbital’s success possible. Dorsey explains the technology behind the business so fluidly that it hardly seems like rocket science.

If Orbital’s story offers inspiration, another new book offers exactly the opposite. When you see an airplane crashing from a clear blue sky, you just have to watch. When you encounter one of the great triumph-to-disaster stories in the history of American business the rise and fall of Apple Computer Inc. you just have to read on.

Michael S. Malone’s Infinite Loop: How The World’s Most Insanely Great Computer Company Went Insane (Currency/Doubleday, $27.50, 0385486847) is the stuff of a corporate horror movie, replete with moments of terrible Scooby-Doo inevitability. Apple founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak might as well be the teenaged couple wandering through the spooky factory, about to pry open the icebox door to see what’s making the noise inside. You want to put hands over eyes and scream: Wozniak, no! Don’t give away blocks of your founders’ stock to 30 buddies on a whim! Jobs, no! Don’t shoot down CEO John Sculley’s idea of making the Macintosh IBM-compatible! This is the tale of a company that had it all and blew it. Early in the personal computer age, Apple had superior technology on its side. Its customers displayed fanatical product loyalty. Its young founders became instant archetypes of the creative energy that made U.S. high-tech industries the envy of the world. But Jobs and Wozniak achieved too much too early in life. Success thoroughly ruined their magic and nearly ruined the company.

Malone tries to cut through the Silicon Valley mythology that now surrounds the company’s beginnings in the garage of Jobs’s Santa Clara, California home, and he makes a special effort to recognize key players in its first years who have not shared the limelight since. Malone was an insider for part of Apple’s early journey and covered the company as a journalist at other times. He brings to this account an authority and an evident big-picture understanding that lay to rest any conflict-of-interest concerns. Still, his disgust with Steve Jobs fairly oozes from these pages. There is a grudging tone to his rather passing acknowledgment that a more grown-up Jobs (now a wise old man of 43) has presided over quite a turnaround at Apple since he engineered a boardroom coup and returned to the helm in 1997. The book went to press in October 1998, just as the new iMac line of PCs had begun to rack up some of Apple’s best sales in years. Since then the numbers have made a Merlin of Jobs once more. Apple’s profits are way up, and the company said in April that it had doubled its share of the retail desktop market over the past year.

In The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity, Alan Cooper has a message for fellow technologists: Get human.

A much-lauded software author and designer, Cooper sets out in this book to make the business case for interaction design. Interaction design is a lofty-sounding term for what ought to be an obvious concept: making things (such as computer software and hardware) that people can easily use.

Such a simple truth has eluded Silicon Valley’s best minds, in Cooper’s view. And he says it doesn’t have to be that way. Designers don’t have to make guinea pigs out of customers, rolling out half-baked versions of computer products and then relying on users’ complaints as the basis to tweak subsequent editions.

Cooper’s book is a plea for technology’s high priests to meet the masses halfway. Sure, people in business must come to terms with bits and bytes, he argues but those who turn ones and zeroes into screen icons need to do a much better job of focusing on the needs of computer users.

Inmates’ main audience is the general business reader, for whom the book is a glimpse at how the technologists do their thing and how they could do it better, making the lives of computer users easier and making companies that depend on technology more successful.

Cooper offers an alternative to the Microsoft way of doing things. In fact, Bill Gates makes a case against interaction design in Business @ The Speed of Thought: Using a Digital Nervous System (written with Collins Hemingway; Warner Books, $30, 0446525685; Little Brown, Abridged, $24.98, 1570427526; Time Warner Audio, Unabridged, $49.98, 1570427534). You’re usually better off tackling smaller processes and building on them, Gates argues, and then improv[ing] the solution as you get user feedback. To many of the millions who work with Microsoft products every day, user feedback sounds like a euphemism for the anguished squawks emitted when a program performs an illegal operation and shuts itself down, or when that annoying little paperclip guy pops up on screen to ask whether you know how to write a letter.

But the Microsoft way is here to stay, and, on balance, that may be a good thing. More than anyone else, Gates has brought computer technology into the everyday lives of people the world over. One can politely debate him, as Cooper does, or hate him but not ignore him. He is the Alpha Nerd.

Business @ The Speed of Thought lays out Gates’s vision of the near future in worldwide business and society. His underlying message: You ain’t seen nothin’ yet. For all the productivity gains registered by businesses in the past decade through the skillful deployment of technology, the hot-wired organizations of the 21st century hold the promise of even greater progress. The book is full of real-world examples of companies whose digital nervous systems are making them more efficient and profitable by improving the flow of information among decision-makers at all levels.

Not all of these systems are necessarily produced by Microsoft. Gates uses his company’s inner workings to show the processes that go into digitizing a business, but he also candidly discusses Microsoft’s, and his own, failures of strategic vision in the past most notably its tardiness in embracing the internet’s potential.

Gates makes a persuasive argument that technology can be a liberating force. In businesses, improved digital information systems can empower employees to move beyond carrying out orders and take more initiative on their own. Beyond business in education, government, and elsewhere in society the same systems can benefit the common good.

Nashville journalist E. Thomas Wood is the author of Karski: How One Man Tried to Stop the Holocaust (Wiley).

Beyond nerd chic. We are all nerds now. Or maybe there are no nerds anymore. One way or the other, technology has reached the masses in the past two decades. This sense that humanity’s relationship with technology is attaining a certain maturity seems to permeate a crop of recent books that cover the past, present, and future of high-tech industries.

Case in point: Folks can launch their own satellites now. One of the most inspiring business books of the past year tells how a little company full of big ideas, Virginia-based Orbital Sciences Corp., got into the business of putting commercial satellites into space. In Silicon Sky: How One Small Start-Up Went Over the Top to Beat the Big Boys into Satellite Heaven (Perseus Books, $26, 0738200948), author Gary Dorsey chronicles the progress of a pipe dream as it has evolved into a company with 1998 revenues of $734 million.

Orbital founder David Thompson gave Dorsey unfettered access to the company’s inner workings from the beginning of its efforts to design a commercially viable communications satellite in 1992 through the first launch in 1995. The author clearly identifies with Thompson’s entrepreneurial ardor, contrasting Orbital’s culture of discovery with the feudal, unimaginative culture of old-line aerospace companies addicted to government contracts.

What Dorsey lacks in objectivity, he makes up for in clarity. From his fly-on-the-wall perch, sitting in on company meetings and peering over the shoulders of workers in the lab, he has observed and distilled into concise prose the details that made Orbital’s success possible. Dorsey explains the technology behind the business so fluidly that it hardly seems like rocket science.

If Orbital’s story offers inspiration, another new book offers exactly the opposite. When you see an airplane crashing from a clear blue sky, you just have to watch. When you encounter one of the great triumph-to-disaster stories in the history of American business the rise and fall of Apple Computer Inc. you just have to read on.

Michael S. Malone’s Infinite Loop: How The World’s Most Insanely Great Computer Company Went Insane (Currency/Doubleday, $27.50, 0385486847) is the stuff of a corporate horror movie, replete with moments of terrible Scooby-Doo inevitability. Apple founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak might as well be the teenaged couple wandering through the spooky factory, about to pry open the icebox door to see what’s making the noise inside. You want to put hands over eyes and scream: Wozniak, no! Don’t give away blocks of your founders’ stock to 30 buddies on a whim! Jobs, no! Don’t shoot down CEO John Sculley’s idea of making the Macintosh IBM-compatible! This is the tale of a company that had it all and blew it. Early in the personal computer age, Apple had superior technology on its side. Its customers displayed fanatical product loyalty. Its young founders became instant archetypes of the creative energy that made U.S. high-tech industries the envy of the world. But Jobs and Wozniak achieved too much too early in life. Success thoroughly ruined their magic and nearly ruined the company.

Malone tries to cut through the Silicon Valley mythology that now surrounds the company’s beginnings in the garage of Jobs’s Santa Clara, California home, and he makes a special effort to recognize key players in its first years who have not shared the limelight since. Malone was an insider for part of Apple’s early journey and covered the company as a journalist at other times. He brings to this account an authority and an evident big-picture understanding that lay to rest any conflict-of-interest concerns. Still, his disgust with Steve Jobs fairly oozes from these pages. There is a grudging tone to his rather passing acknowledgment that a more grown-up Jobs (now a wise old man of 43) has presided over quite a turnaround at Apple since he engineered a boardroom coup and returned to the helm in 1997. The book went to press in October 1998, just as the new iMac line of PCs had begun to rack up some of Apple’s best sales in years. Since then the numbers have made a Merlin of Jobs once more. Apple’s profits are way up, and the company said in April that it had doubled its share of the retail desktop market over the past year.

In The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity (Macmillan Computer Publishing, $25, 0672316498), Alan Cooper has a message for fellow technologists: Get human.

A much-lauded software author and designer, Cooper sets out in this book to make the business case for interaction design. Interaction design is a lofty-sounding term for what ought to be an obvious concept: making things (such as computer software and hardware) that people can easily use.

Such a simple truth has eluded Silicon Valley’s best minds, in Cooper’s view. And he says it doesn’t have to be that way. Designers don’t have to make guinea pigs out of customers, rolling out half-baked versions of computer products and then relying on users’ complaints as the basis to tweak subsequent editions.

Cooper’s book is a plea for technology’s high priests to meet the masses halfway. Sure, people in business must come to terms with bits and bytes, he argues but those who turn ones and zeroes into screen icons need to do a much better job of focusing on the needs of computer users.

Inmates’ main audience is the general business reader, for whom the book is a glimpse at how the technologists do their thing and how they could do it better, making the lives of computer users easier and making companies that depend on technology more successful.

Cooper offers an alternative to the Microsoft way of doing things. In fact, Bill Gates makes a case against interaction design in Business @ The Speed of Thought: Using a Digital Nervous System (written with Collins Hemingway; Warner Books, $30, 0446525685; Little Brown, Abridged, $24.98, 1570427526; Time Warner Audio, Unabridged, $49.98, 1570427534). You’re usually better off tackling smaller processes and building on them, Gates argues, and then improv[ing] the solution as you get user feedback. To many of the millions who work with Microsoft products every day, user feedback sounds like a euphemism for the anguished squawks emitted when a program performs an illegal operation and shuts itself down, or when that annoying little paperclip guy pops up on screen to ask whether you know how to write a letter.

But the Microsoft way is here to stay, and, on balance, that may be a good thing. More than anyone else, Gates has brought computer technology into the everyday lives of people the world over. One can politely debate him, as Cooper does, or hate him but not ignore him. He is the Alpha Nerd.

Business @ The Speed of Thought lays out Gates’s vision of the near future in worldwide business and society. His underlying message: You ain’t seen nothin’ yet. For all the productivity gains registered by businesses in the past decade through the skillful deployment of technology, the hot-wired organizations of the 21st century hold the promise of even greater progress. The book is full of real-world examples of companies whose digital nervous systems are making them more efficient and profitable by improving the flow of information among decision-makers at all levels.

Not all of these systems are necessarily produced by Microsoft. Gates uses his company’s inner workings to show the processes that go into digitizing a business, but he also candidly discusses Microsoft’s, and his own, failures of strategic vision in the past most notably its tardiness in embracing the internet’s potential.

Gates makes a persuasive argument that technology can be a liberating force. In businesses, improved digital information systems can empower employees to move beyond carrying out orders and take more initiative on their own. Beyond business in education, government, and elsewhere in society the same systems can benefit the common good.

Nashville journalist E. Thomas Wood is the author of Karski: How One Man Tried to Stop the Holocaust (Wiley).

John Naisbitt first developed the concept of high tech, high touch in his 1982 bestseller Megatrends. He theorized that in a world of technology, people long for personal, human contact.

Naisbitt re-examines this idea in his latest book, High Tech/High Touch.

What an appropriate time to be checking our technological pulse, an age when most everyone is wired with pagers, cell phones, e-mail, voice mail, and faxes. Ê High Tech/High Touch states its premise up front: The two biggest markets in the United States are consumer technology and escape from consumer technology. It then proceeds to chronicle the advancement of technology in our lives, the dangers it imposes, and our instinct to both embrace and escape it.

The authors gathered their research by culling thousands of newspaper articles and interviewing dozens of experts in science, medicine, sociology, psychology, education, business, and theology. They seek to pinpoint where we are today, and provide us with a roadmap for the future. They place us in what they call a Technologically Intoxicated Zone, a netherworld where we are bombarded with technological stimuli. Here is their partial list of the symptoms: we fear and worship technology; we blur the distinction between real and fake; we accept violence as normal; and we live our lives distanced and distracted.

And how do we struggle to bring the high touch back into our lives? According to the authors, we seek meaning through religion; we buy self-help books; we pop Prozac, Viagra, and other supplements; we seek a tangential connection to nature by driving sports utility vehicles and buying clothes from L.

L. Bean.

There are no surprising revelations in High Tech/High Touch. Every trend and development outlined seems obvious. And the authors offer no unique answers to save us from our technological overload. Their solutions are simple: pull the plug on the computer and TV, turn off the cell phone and beeper, and spend more time with family and friends.

The book isn’t so much a crystal ball as it is a mirror, allowing us to reflect and leaving us to decide whether there is too much high technology and too little humanness in our lives. ¦ John T. Slania is a freelance writer and journalism professor in Chicago.

One of the most significant changes in the last 20 years has been the development and awe-inspiring acceptance of the World Wide Web. People use the Web to communicate around the globe. The story of how such technology came to prominence is engrossing, particularly when the creator of the Web, Tim Berners-Lee, writes it himself, as he does in Weaving the Web.

From the early days in the 1980s when the author was developing the Web in one lab in Switzerland to the ubiquitous technology used by countless millions today, the author details the roadblocks and breakthroughs that built the World Wide Web. It is the story of twin development: the technology and software to access the Web, and the creation of a vast world-wide infrastructure of servers and information to populate the Web. Berners-Lee effectively walks the line by giving enough technical details for the reader to understand what went into the Web’s creation without drowning the average non-technical reader in computer science lingo and archaic programming terms. Berners-Lee spends more time discussing the psychology of how he conceived the Web, and how he wanted the pieces and details to work together.

No technology is developed in a vacuum, however, and Berners-Lee does an excellent job of giving credit to those whose inventions and inspirations gave the Web key boosts during its nascent stages. In fact, the egos and personalities that had to mesh for the Web to work make for some lively reading and give what could have been a book solely about technology an added depth.

Most interesting, however, is the author’s view of the World Wide Web’s future. The technological leap the Web has made is but a small step compared to the direction Berners-Lee would like it to go. In the last two chapters of the book, he proposes a future Web that has profound and lasting social and business effects that are not even considered today, and if his future endeavors match the tireless effort he put into the Web’s first 20 years, it is easy to imagine what his follow-up book will detail. ¦ Dean Miller is an associate publisher for Que computer books and a freelance writer based in Carmel, Indiana.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. That old cliche is of remarkably little use today, at least when it’s applied to the American economy. Now, it’s more appropriate to say: the more things change, the more they change.

You can blame technology, you can blame global trade, with its implications for worldwide competition on prices and wages. You can blame whomever you want. The fact is that change is the only constant left in business, and businesses small and large are left with the stark choices of adapting or ceasing to exist. There’s no more resting on your laurels. No more following the same manufacturing procedure year after year. No more downtime. It’s pretty exhausting just reading about all this change.

It’s not Kansas anymore; it’s Oz. So writes Kevin Kelly in New Rules for the New Economy: 10 Radical Strategies for a Connected World (Viking, $19.95, 0670881112). Author Kelly, executive editor of Wired magazine, delivers on the radical in the book’s subtitle. He provides an intriguing look at how seemingly eternal business verities are being turned on their heads by advances in computer technology.

One of Mr. Kelly’s new rules is to embrace the swarm. With computer networks and the Internet itself key symbols for the just-about-to-hit-us economy, the author makes a strong case that centralized and hierarchical decision-making isn’t going to cut it very well anymore. The swarm represents all those people, companies, potential customers at various points on interconnected networks. Straight lines are out, decentralization is in. Mr. Kelly writes: Numerous small things connected together into a network generate enormous power. Another radical aspect of the new economy is the downward path of prices, especially for technology and information and services available via the Internet. It’s a trend already in evidence that’s led to a fierce debate about the appropriate business model for successful commerce on the Internet. Mr. Kelly’s point of view is contained in a chapter titled Follow the Free. In it, he writes, Giving stuff away captures human attention, or mind share, which then leads to market share. At some point, you’ve got to charge for something to stay in business, but you have to be flexible and selective. More and more services will head toward commoditization and near-free pricing. The saving grace, as Mr. Kelly sees it, is demand for new ideas and services limited only by human imagination. It still seems like a tough way to make a living.

Richard W. Oliver is another gazer into the economic future, which is fun as well as important work. In The Shape of Things to Come: Seven Imperatives for Winning in the New World of Business (McGraw-Hill, $24.95, 0070482632), the professor at Vanderbilt University’s Owen Graduate School of Management presents a broad, bold, and generally optimistic view of a future just about on top of us.

I, for one, am just getting use to the Information Age, that post-industrial era that’s given us worldwide, real-time information flows, but Mr. Oliver maintains that it’s just about over (although key aspects of different eras, including the old Industrial Age, can continue even when a new phase takes over). He says we’re already moving into the Bio-Materials Age. We’ve seen evidence of it already in the engineering of crops and in other aspects of agriculture. Mr. Oliver predicts wider biological applications even for manufacturing and technology.

Mr. Oliver’s view of the future, while admittedly a busy place, is optimistic because, among other things, he sees a worldwide class of consumer emerging in the next century who demands high standards and good prices and gets them. He sees increased economic power for people of developing nations and for members of minority groups. And he says that no monopoly will be able to last very long. He writes: Information moves too quickly, technology changes too fast, and competitors are too aggressive to leave any idea, market, or profits to a single organization. Mr. Oliver’s broad menu for successful businesses in the new era is not for the faint of heart. He talks about daily reinvention and a close relationship with customers that includes direct communication and distribution, personalization, and putting customers in charge of marketing. One of Mr. Oliver’s most interesting concepts for the new era of business is electronic keiretsu. The keiretsu is a Japanese way of doing business in which companies linked by mutual interest, such as a manufacturer and its suppliers, act as a truly interdependent group, or a business family. The author’s idea here is that companies will have to form alliances, permanent or temporary, which meet mutual needs in a sharply competitive world.

Just as in Mr. Kelly’s New Rules for the New Economy, Mr. Oliver envisions the increased commoditization of many goods and services. In fact, Mr. Oliver says even high quality isn’t enough to differentiate one company’s products from another over the long run. So what’s a company to do to make itself heard above the din of competition? Mr. Oliver’s answer in a word: logistics. The ability to get exactly what a customer wants in front of him first (high quality is assumed) may be the key competitive advantage of the near future.

The concepts of electronic keiretsu of allied companies and logistics as a competitive edge bring us to the ideas of Charles H. Fine, a professor at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The subtitle of his new book indicates how competitive we’ve already become, that we’ve already reached a place where no advantage is permanent. The book is called Clockspeed: Winning Industry Control in the Age of Temporary Advantage. To grossly oversimplify, Mr. Fine posits that as companies think about how to reshape themselves, the biggest advantage a company may have is the ability to determine which of its functions will continue to hold value. The author puts it this way: In this age of temporary advantage, the ultimate core competency is the ability to choose capabilities well. It’s more complicated than choosing which functions to continue in-house and which to outsource to others.

This is a complex book by a knowledgeable observer who uses specific, up-to-date corporate case histories to support his points. He focuses on the need for a company to properly design its supply chain in order to prosper. He writes: Properly viewed, the company and its supply chain are joined at the hip, a single organic unit engaged in a joint enterprise. The term clockspeed itself seems particularly apt for our constantly changing, technologically driven economy. To me, it creates the image of old-fashioned clock hands (pre-digital) spinning wildly out of control. It’s left to us mere mortals to find ways to keep up. Mr. Fine acknowledges the potential for disorientation from conducting business in a world of rapid technological change. He says slow-clockspeed social institutions may take on added importance as stability flees from our commercial lives.

No matter the pace at which the clock is turning in the industry in which you are employed, a manager’s life still involves dealing with people. That much, at least, hasn’t yet changed. So, for the real people who happen to be managers, international management consultant Lisa Davis has written Shortcuts for Smart Managers: Checklists, Worksheets and Action Plans for Managers with No Time to Waste (Amacom, $24.95, 08114404324).

The book consists of practical, here-and-now advice on the wide range of a manager’s duties, from budgets to business ethics, from delegating to project planning. In addition to common-sensical advice on each topic, Ms. Davis presents a plethora of checklists to use in the office.

Oh yes, Ms. Davis even has a chapter on change management. In a passage on change that can serve as a window on the entirety of this useful book, she writes: As a manager, you have to get used to the idea that it’s a lonely job and tough at the top. You may not, for whatever reason, be wholeheartedly committed to the upcoming change. Even so, you have to remain calm, steady, firm, and consistent. The team takes its lead from you. Neal Lipschutz is managing editor of Dow Jones News Service.

Working via the Internet is work. Some would argue it’s the work of the future. Jaclyn Easton, a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, offers intriguing insight into the emerging world of online commerce in Striking It Rich.

Com: Profiles of 23 Incredibly Successful Websites That You’ve Probably Never Heard Of. While it’s been claimed that there’s not yet a clear business model for the Internet, Easton’s subjects simply rolled up their sleeves and got to work. Their e-commerce ventures are not household names and their level of financial disclosure varies, but all are showing significant growth. Their offerings (power tools, perfume, printing services) and sources of revenues (sales, advertising) are all over the map. Easton knows the territory and these short case studies are highly recommended for anyone contemplating making the plunge to the Web. These early arrivals are doing quite well.

(One of the things I learned from the book is this: hits are not people. The nomenclature of Web sites is filled with references to how many hits a site receives in a month. You’d think that means individuals going to the site. But hits relate to the number of files needed to connect you to a site, with text and graphics making up individual hits. So calling up one home page one time might register any number of hits for that site.) Neal Lipschutz is managing editor of Dow Jones News Service.