I've worked under a person very much like Wolfram in terms of an ego so large they can't see the world around it. I remember having a product planning meeting one time where he went into a great detail about this sweeping plan he had come up with. With a great many diagrams and thought points and slides (oh the slides!), he described a system he believed would radically change humanity, advance the species etc. etc. etc. At the end of his speech, somebody asked, "aren't you just describing essentially this piece of technology <listing several extant examples>?" To which he paused for a good minute, minute and a half and responded "no! it's totally different!" It reminded me of the 7 minute abs routine.

The problem was not that he hadn't come up with something interesting. It was that what he had come up with was something everybody had come up with. He had just spent so much time holed up in his office writing and making diagrams that he hadn't poked his head up into the world enough to realize that he hadn't come up with anything unique or interesting.

This ego feeding manifested itself in all kinds of interesting ways. For example, his ego required that the things we were producing were unique based on what he knew. Even if we were building something that was essentially the same thing that everybody else in the world had built, he'd direct us to build it in some fashion that often ignored the practical results of good engineering practice (learned through thousands of iterations of trial and error over decades) and make it function in a way that was unique to our products, but not necessarily better, and because we were ignored so many hard lessons others had learned for us, often with significant downsides. Long after these things had been implemented, and the downsides of this approach were now readily apparent and in-your-face, we'd go back to him -- to which his reply would be, "I'll have a solution in the next version!"

Months later he'd roll out his new development roadmap that failed entirely to address those issues, pretending like they had never been brought up (no Adoubt since they bruised his ego) and sent us off in another random, but already well understood direction, but cock angled so we'd end up making another round of well documented mistakes.

A real simple example, instead of showing aggregate sums for discrete values in a data field as a simple bar chart, he insisted we use a different metaphor that had long since been abandoned by the field -- only he refused to acknowledge it. This fit the "novelty" requirement for his ego, but failed the "useful" part of building software.

What finally ended it all was a perfect storm of past customers all coming and complaining that they weren't getting the product they were paying for. In some cases we'd even been paid to fix long outstanding problems created by our failure to design well understood parts of the software around well understood metaphors. The result is that he very quickly went to being "no longer with the company".

My lessons from that experience is that innovation is important, but it has to be built on the solid foundation of past experience. Even Newton understood this, "If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants."

The problem with something like "A New Kind of Science" is that it's not new. It's a study of the applications of a well understood field onto other fields. If it was written without ego the title would have been "A Study of the Applications of Cellular Automata and State Machines" or "Recognizing Computation in Cross-Domain Studies Using Cellular Automata", or the lofty "An Exhautive Review of Cellular Automata with Applications as Turing Machines." In other words, NKS brings us back to square one with Turing's "What is computable?" Only looked at from another angle.

It's not that what's in the book isn't interesting, it is. It's that it's not revolutionary in the way Wolfram wishes it was. It's "merely" evolutionary and Wolfram refuses to understand that. And just like my old Boss always chided us with a "wait and see" and a twinkle in his eye whenever we pointed this out, Wolfram's response is "wait and see".