I don't know, and it certainly feels kind of silly reading the prologue where it promises to reinvent everything, but I found that book to be fascinating and thought provoking. It didn't change the world but a lot of people are throwing the baby out with the bathwater, there's a lot of good stuff in there. If he had renamed it "Cellular Automata are fun!" or something less bombastic, it would be an instant classic.

Also, I think the key insight is pretty deep -- systems are either trivially simple, or limitlessly complex, once you reach a (very low) level of complexity, you can do pretty much anything.