Book — Being Digital — by Nicholas Negroponte

The new guy (a new graduate) on my team loaned me his copy as about the only book in his library that I hadn't already read, after I had pointed him in the direction of a lot of SF and said "read that" to his counter-suggestions.

Nothing dates so quickly as the future…

From the viewpoint of 14 years after, it's easy to see that his vision completely missed out blogging (and user generated content in general) -- the tacit assumption throughout is that the MSM would still be the main source of content; and the mobile phone (and wireless in general) -- like the pre-wired house of the future (when I laid cabling at home about 10 years ago, that was bleeding edge; in '06 when I ripped it out, it was an embarrassing anachronism), or the home system that would detect that you were out and answer the phone without waiting to ring-out (rather than the call being expected to go to you at your mobile rather than the fixed location, your house). And he only vaguely got something in the neighbourhood of search engines.

Overall, an interesting read from a perspective of history, but that is all that remains.