Customer Reviews

Pushing The Envelope

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

It has now been over three years since Pushing the Envelope was published and available on bookshelves across the country (actually the only place you will find it is Borders in Dubuque). I figured I would try to give a fair and honest overview now that I have finally gotten some feedback.

First off, this book is not a masterpiece - not anywhere close to. From its conception in the summer of 2000 until about 2002 I wasn't even sure what I was doing. I just knew I had a lot of thoughts about where technology was going. The convergence of devices, industries, and services has always been the central theme. At some point around the time Enron was falling apart and the Bush administration was beginning widespread wiretapping, I decided to make things interesting and add conspiracy to my then future-world.

Pushing the Envelope was rushed to market. Many of my ideas were starting to become reality and I wanted a book about the future, not a review. My goal is to eventually republish with better characters and more pictures. Most of the strange pseudo-names and bolded vocabulary words will be rescinded because I feel they only add confusion to an already very complicated novel.

I would still recommend this version to anyone who would like to see what kinds of hardware/software will exist in the years to come, particularly you - Mr. Bill Gates.

Headache.

This word sums up this book perfectly. The author has a long way to go to finding a real story. When I was not looking over the poor grammar and broken paragraphs I had to wonder if the author even had an editor. Confusing and annoying.

This is a very thought provoking book and the author presents a lot of good ideas and interesting well thought out marketing plans and pricing schemes. The author's ideas on the future of cell phones are original and it makes you wonder why cell phones and PCs are not further along today, Bill Gates has even admitted that when first dreaming up the PC he thought today we would be much more advanced, the book shadows this idea. Written in a journal format it is a quick paced read. Although a technical book the author has included a glossary in the back of the book covering a lot of the terminology. Recommended read for anyone interested in understanding the changes that we will see in PCs and cell phone as they converge over the next 5 years.

Pushing the Envelope, written in journal form, is the story of wide eyed Joe Sedulus, heir to the worlds most powerful technology company, as he makes sense of his new life post-academia and is given the responsibility of overseeing the companies bleeding edge mobile platform. The events that chronicle Sedelus' initiation into the world of the rich and powerful by his father are augmented by technological overviews and their creative applications meant to bring the reader deeper into the world running on Maxion(tm).

The result is an encompassing piece of futurist imagination that any lover of computing technology would enjoy. It's difficult to go even a few pages without pausing to weigh the implications of the ideas presented which touch on not only computer technology, but financial systems, politics, the media, industrial design, human computer interaction, and the education system. The book contains sharp analysis, detailed hierarchies, homages to square peg personalities of recent history, the author's hometown and alma mater, as well as tongue in cheek humor that only the biggest techies will catch.

Although the ending comes a bit quickly the book leaves open the possibility for a continuation. The storytelling is a little uneven at times but the authors concepts are so much fun to ponder that it makes up for any deficits. In conclusion Pushing the Envelope lays out the groundwork for the author's unique style of computer-science-fiction that trades the grandiose or fantastic for an eerily possible alternate reality only slightly diverged from our own.

This book was a tough one to put down. I enjoyed every minute of it. Very creative!

A friend bought this as a gag gift. Wow, this was the most pathetic attempt at writing I have ever seen. I actually wanted to cry after reading this. The author must be living in a fantasy world. A world ripe with bad grammar and no imagination.

I will never regain the life I wasted after reading this book.

Stay away. Be afraid.