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Book Value

Read reviews of five new business books -- three about making your Web efforts pay off, one on the origin of Linux, and one about the education of a fabled Silicon Valley entrepreneur.

Boys on the Brand

OK, so your business is online. Now what? Recent books aim to make your Web efforts pay off

• The 11 Immutable Laws of Internet Branding, by Al Ries and Laura Ries (HarperBusiness, 2000)
• eBrands, by Phil Carpenter (Harvard Business School Press, 2000)
• Digital Capital, by Don Tapscott, David Ticoll, and Alex Lowy (Harvard Business School Press, 2000)

There's plenty of advice out there about doing business on the Web. The trouble is, when do you find time to stop and read if you're supposed to be building an Internet business at breakneck speed?

Some of the advice, however, is worth heeding. For example, in The 11 Immutable Laws of Internet Branding, Al and Laura Ries tell nascent Internet companies that they need to be "fast," "first," and "focused." But even though they trot out examples of how some superior sites have suffered from being second, there's not a lot of detail about what to do when you discover that your site isn't first.

What the authors do well is articulate how important they think branding is to success on the Internet. They also advise that wanna-bes who are poised on the brink of taking their companies online need to decide whether they plan to use the Internet as a distribution channel or as a place to operate a business. If you plan to use the Web for distributing your already established products, then it's fine to retain your company's current name, for instance. But if "the Internet is going to be a business," they advise, "then you must start from scratch." As for coming up with a new company name, you'll have to go elsewhere for advice on that one.

In eBrands, Phil Carpenter doesn't tell us how to build a killer brand on the Internet either, but he does tell us how six successful Internet companies have done it. Of course, it's impossible to say how long those companies -- despite their high profiles -- are going to remain healthy, let alone stay leaders in their respective markets. There is good case-study material here and specific examples of what the companies have done well -- and, in some instances, not so well. But you'd be hard-pressed to take what you read here about some exemplary companies and go out and quickly construct your own Internet business.

Such hands-on advice does come in Digital Capital, by Don Tapscott, David Ticoll, and Alex Lowy. Their book is based on three years of research on what they call "business webs," which are partner networks of producers, service providers, suppliers, infrastructure companies, and customers -- all linked by digital channels.

Based on their research, the authors have concluded that there are five classes of business webs, and they give examples of each that most readers will recognize. What makes Digital Capital stand out is that while the authors join the Rieses and Carpenter in recognizing the importance of brand building, they actually take the time to study the market, analyze it, and draw some bold conclusions based on their findings.

The reader comes away with valuable ideas for replicating the models that successful businesses are using. Now that things are moving so fast on the Internet, that take-away is a must.

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Good Stuff Cheap

• Free for All, by Peter Wayner (HarperBusiness, 2000)

In January 1999, as a witness in the Microsoft antitrust trial, Richard Schmalensee, the dean of the Sloan School of Management at MIT, tried to debunk the notion that the computer giant was a monopoly by pointing out that it indeed had competitors. Among the few he named was a small operating system called Linux. That testimony, author Peter Wayner suggests, put Linux on the map.

Linux is really a group of programs known as open-source software. The programmers who wrote the source code for Linux have shared it openly over the Internet since the early 1990s, enhancing the operating system and passing it on. By 1999 a growing number of computer experts were choosing free Linux programs over pricey Microsoft offerings for running some Web servers.

Free for All: How Linux and the Free Software Movement Undercut the High-Tech Titans is a fascinating story of how a motley group of far-flung programmers built a better operating system by sharing everything with everyone. It's also the story of how Linux began to see signs of triumph as it started taking business away from companies with more costly programs. As a result, Linux gave birth to a small industry of resellers like Red Hat, which repackages Linux with instructions to make it easier for novices to use and sells it for about $60.

The programmers who pioneered Linux may never see a dime from Red Hat's revenues or its August 1999 initial public offering. But they can still have the satisfaction of knowing that they collectively built an operating system -- using nowhere near the money and resources their competitors had -- that is now preferred by many over the ubiquitous Windows.