Future Hype - The Myth of Technology Change - by Bob Seidensticker, is an interesting read although not one that will excite you and keep you reading until you reach its end. It is an anti-hype book that addresses the issue of over-hyping new technology development and its market adoption. For all the professional over-hypers in this world, this book must read like a nightmare. But due to what it is - a critical book - it will probably not end up on the bestseller lists. This is also due to the fact that while it does a good job in finding logical reasons why so many technology statements are wrong and why we tend to get them wrong, it does not also try to develop conclusions or even guidelines how to do it better. It criticizes (for good reasons) but then ends there.

Maybe Bob Seidensticker has another book in the works that will (at least partly) give the tech marketers their smile back. It remains a fact also that he must have profited a lot financially from his time working at Microsoft during its (hyper) growth years and has now had the freedom to travel the world and spend eight years (as he says) on this book. Lastly it would be probably quite embarassing for him to have a bestseller book that became one because some folks hyped it up. This of course will also not happen because I don't know who would promote this book since he also criticizes the press who, intentionally or not, always like to overyhype new technologies.

To give you a quick taste of his writing, here e.g. the 9 High-Tech Myths that he identifies:

• Change is exponential
• Technology is inevitable
• Important new products arrive ever faster
• Today's price reductions are unprecedented
• Products are adopted faster
• Invention gestation time is decreasing
• The Internet changes everything
• Moore's law really matters