Interop - Theory and Practice

Harvard's Berkman Center has produced some of the best thinking around on the relationship between technology and society.  The latest book by its John Palfrey and Urs Gasser - Interop: The Promise and Perils of Highly Interconnected Systems - does not fit into that category. Interoperability - the ability of systems to communicate with each other and thus function in tandem is indeed critical to the functioning of increasingly complex and interconnected systems. Palfrey and Gasser go in search of every scholar's meme - a theory of interop - and fall flat. To describe what interop is is not to describe what it really means. Rather, since by its nature it is so complex, adaptive and ubiquitous, one wonders what gain a proper "theory of interop" would grant. Ultimately, it doesn't matter because Palfrey and Gasser simply give example after example of interop while failing in their self-set task - to unify a theory of it. Anyone with even a passing familiarity with technology will find this book uninformative.  Better luck next time