Even though this may seem like fairytales to some, Dertouzos has built this vision of the future using solid basis on the technology that either we have in prototypes today or likely to be attainable in the near future. His work at MIT has already shown that as computing resources become more plentiful, Human-Centric computing will become a possibility.

My overall impression of the book is that it has some novel ideas and very persuasive author that is working hard to get you to like them. The book seem a little repetitive at times but over all it as a very interesting read.

In some ways this is the gold-collared knowledge worker counterpart book to Ted Halstead and Michael Lind's The Radical Center: The Future of American Politics (citizen-centered). Those who liked The Cultural Creatives or IMAGINE: What America Could be in the 21st Century, can adopt this book as their user's guide for demanding change in information technology.

I recommend it because it is full of common sense, is the first really helpful "requirements document" for a clean sheet new approach to software and hardware and ergonomics ($3000 word for user friendly). The bad news is that nobody is listening. We are ten years away from this being a reality because the legacy providers (big hardware, one certain software company) are not about to retool their empires for the sake of delivering better value.

It is more than a little amusing to me to have this book endorsed by the CEO of the one company that prides itself on producing software with mutated migrated Application Program Interfaces that are used to extort tribute from third party software developers, where no sane consumer will invest in his products until they've had three years to "mature" in the marketplace.

The opening listings of the "standard faults" in today's "consumer electronics" is alone worth the price of the book--unintegrated systems fault; manual labor fault; human servitude fault; crash fault; excessive learning fault; feature overload fault; fake intelligence fault; waiting fault; ratchet fault...

The book ends on a low note and high note. The low note is a description of Oxygen, a $50M project seeded by DARPA and including several major company partners such as HP and Nokia. This project has some excellent ideas, including a new focus on an architecture for nomadic computing with three aspects: a Handy 21 (hand-held), Enviro 21 (intermediate personal computers at home, office, and in car), and N21 Network (Intentional Naming System, every computer and peripheral everywhere is in the public domain and broadcasting its location and status, use on the fly). Good stuff. What he doesn't mention is that the U.S. Government is spending over half a billion dollars on completely uncoordinated desktop analysis toolkits, and there is probably 2-3X that much being spent in the private sector. He does note that we will never get our act together if we continue to develop hardware and software in a very fragmented and hardware-based manner.

On the high note, the author has clearly thought about the consequences of having an information revolution here in the USA, creating information royalty, while leaving the rest of the world dispossessed, in poverty, and unconnected. He has a very practical appreciation for the fact that the USA must fund two distinct foreign assistance programs--a Digital Marshall Plan (my phrase) to jack in the entire world; and a commensurate literacy, birth control, disease control, and famine control program to stabilize populations to the point where they can be productive within the global grid.

I read this book on the airplane coming back from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas (Federal Emerging Technologies Conference sub-set), and I was really struck by the contradiction between the vast fragmentation spread out over Las Vegas (the man who has everything also has to carry it) and the elegant simplicity of this book's vision--one hand-held able to be any of 100+ devices. "It's the software, simpleton...."

What saddens me, especially when considering the billions of dollars being given away by our richest software developer, someone who seems to favor gestures on the margin instead of quality control and open source at the core, is that we knew all this in the mid-1980's. The eighteen distinct functionalities needed for a desktop analysts' workstation were identified by CIA in 1986--everything from data ingestion and conversion softwares to modeling and simulation and pattern detection and of course desktop publishing. The year after the CIA prototypes were working so successfully on UNIX (Sun), CIA decided that the PS2 would be the standard "dumb" terminal, and all UNIX efforts were ordered to shut-down. The big organizations, the ones with the power to make the revolution, chose control and dumb terminals over freedom and smart software. I am very skeptical that the vision in this book will come to fruition...

Dr. Dertouzos is always on the cutting edge of the information revolution in his role as the head of MIT's Computer Laboratory. The core of this book is captured in chapter 8, where MIT's new Oxygen project is described. This is a prototype of "human-centered" information technology. The system combines a portable device for wireless communication, a stationary system built into a room (with transportable software from the portable device to the stationary system), and a network to support the interactions of users to the technology in new ways.

The strongest part of the book is in complaints about the limitations of current information devices and networks. These will be familiar to any computer user, but it is refreshing to hear them from someone involved in drawing the outlines of the future. These include bulky software that does too much (like the word processing program most of us use that keeps automatically reformating what you have typed into something you don't want), weak interfaces between multiple programs and products so they crash when combined, the need to type so much information in, lousy search engines that waste your time, horrible telephone robots for getting to the right number, difficulties in sharing information, and the burdens of unwanted and unneeded e-mail.

His solutions focus on five areas: Letting people converse with information devices in ways similar to how you would speak with a service person in a business; using e-forms to capture your information once and to then automate the sharing of that information with organizations who legitimately need it; finding answers by building on information that others have learned whom you trust; changing the method of distance working and learning so that the interactions are made more realistic and better summarized; and allowing you to tap into personalized, custom software preferences wherever you are and with whatever device you are using.

Each area contains several examples of how these changes might work, many drawn from actual Oxygen applications that are now operating. So you should think of this book as focusing on what will be technically feasible in the next five years or so.

I hope that Dr. Dertouzos will write a sequel to this book that looks further ahead than that in order to begin to spell out an even more improved version of information processing. As much as I was attracted to his vision here, I found that it mainly focused on enhancing the ways that I do things now. I thought that more could be done to help individuals operate in new ways that would vastly enhance human progress. Problem-solving software designed to help structure issues, gather information, analyze it, get feedback from others on the process, and compare to the potential for perfection could be one such example.

Seeing this book also made me realize that much more work of this sort is needed. Without detailed scenarios of how to create solutions that people really want, technologists will continue to provide user unfriendly technology. I suspect that we need a vast experimental activity where people attempt to find new ways to get benefits from technology while removing its hindrances.

Those who read about "human-centered" technology will, of course, want to know what the catch is. You will find towards the end of the book that Dr. Dertouzos points out that making the humans a little more standard in their interactions would allow the information technology to work better. So the vision is still a little along the lines of making each of us fit into the round hole in the technology board. With more technology advances, I hope that aspect will quickly disappear. It certainly should be a primary objective.

After you finish reading this book, I suggest that you create your own scenario for a better way to get a task done with information technology. Then send it along to Dr. Dertouzos, so he can share it with others. In that way, you can help speed the unfinished revolution talked about in this book.

Let's focus on making vast improvements in human benefits, net of human frustration and stress, in all of our technologies rather than focusing on selling products to other technologists! That's the real mindframe shift that is needed!

Berners-Lee talks in depth about the social implications of technology, and indeed the World Wide Web is a social beast as much as it is a technological one. He does separate, however, the duties of bodies like the W3C whose sole purpose is to facilitate and strengthen the standards and protocols that are providing new richness and robustness to the web. This is clearly highlighted in his discussion of PICS, which allows for creation of rules that can facilitate filtering of objectionable material on the web. Berners-Lee makes the clear distinction between those who create the PICS technology, and those who decide how it will be implemented.

It is evident from this book that Berners-Lee is far from finished in his duties. While not as radical as the initial concept of the World-Wide Web must have been in its time, his discussion of security, privacy, and collaboration and how they can and should be implemented on the web should be read by anyone who wants to be a player in Cyberspace. Berners-Lee does not hold a monopoly on great ideas for the web, but he clearly has a grasp on the balance and understanding of both the technology as well as its place in society that others would be well served to strive for.

Berners-Lee writes in plain english, allowing non-programmers to share in his vision and goals for a universal (or should that be uniform?) way to share information across the internet. Especially interesting is the history of the browser market itself, without all the 'browser-war' hype.

Best of all, this book does not read like a technical specification -- but is full of warmth and humor as we see Berners-Lee bring his brainchild to light.

I read "Where Wizards Stay Up Late: the Origins of the Internet" by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon, and desperately wished someone would do similar justice to the history of the web. Not only has someone now done just that, but that someone happens to be the inventor of the web! What more could you ask for?