Out of the box is a line one would come across while talking about product features. Think of something like a simple wall switch - you would ideally not want to have to press 5 buttons to get a light bulb to turn on - instead, you’d just want to apply some pressure on one end of the switch to turn on the light, and on the other end to turn it off. That’s it; that would be the sole OOTB functionality of a light switch. However, as with everything else, things don’t stop there and we add layers of compounding complexity - and all of a sudden you have signing in to a cloud service to get started with a smartphone as one of these OOTB features. Wow - things build fast.

At this point language and semantics also come into the picture. With some context involved, calling something out of the box can suddenly mean something totally different, including some strange wordplay in that hyperlink - it’s not features we’re talking about anymore but ideas or someone’s line of thinking - and mixing contexts can have some very confusing results. And thus we have some better phrases - reflecting common usage, Wikipedia calls it TOTB rather than OOTB; but there really seems to be some eccentricity on part of the language creators about involving boxes in general.

Suddenly there’s (Pandora’s, Jack in the , Man in the ) box, and some endless boxing around making this involvement with boxes even more salient. Boxes are everywhere, as one may notice.

Maybe a movie about the story of boxes could become a box office meta-hit someday.