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HP Fires Father of OOP
An anonymous reader writes "Wow. Hewlett-Packard has disbanded its Advanced Software Research team and sent its leader, reknowned programmer Alan Kay, packing. From today's Good Morning Silicon Valley: 'HP is bidding adieu to legendary Silicon Valley technologist Alan Kay. A founder of Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, Kay -- who once said, "The best way to predict the future is to invent it" -- was instrumental in the development of the windowing GUI and modern object-oriented programming. He envisioned a laptop computer long before the first ones rolled out and his Smalltalk programming language was a predecessor to Sun Microsystems' Java. Hard to believe HP's cutting him loose.' Maybe Apple will hire him."
Looks like Hurd is turning HP into a lean machine to be as focused on products and price as Dell currently is.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
I wouldn't be surprised if HP Execs got wind of him wanting to resign, so they beat him to it. This would save HP from an embarassing loss (someone jumping ship) and make it look like they were just "cleaning house."
"Simplify, simplify, simplify!" Thoreau
I predict that Google announces that they hired him in a week.
Kay is the kind of people that have too much ideas and not enough time to research or implement all of them (in a good sense of course). That means he's got potential ideas lined up waiting for some CPU cycles to become available. You give him carte blanche over a talented team and he create amazing stuff. I'd be the ideal person to build an "Internet Plateform", whatever it is. I can tell what exists today is not "it" and barely registers as functional in his mind. I'd be surprised if he doesn't end at Google.
On that basis, the rest of us still haven't caught up with him! Things like GUIs, portable computers, wireless networking, and the web are all steps towards the future he envisioned. But that future is still a long ways away.
I am thinking this notion of corporation, needs to go away. Make every business a sing propriatary whatever.. the people running the business need to have some sort of responsibility. The way corporations are now no one is responsible for anything anymore. If a corporation ends up doing something evil in the name of profit (which it will if it the reward is worth the risk, b/c a corporation as an entity has no conscience no purpose other than acrue wealth) there is no one to hold accountable (with the rara exception).
Who's up for amending the US constitution?
Bill Gates scooped up the VMS team. My bet is that BG is already on site and trying hard to pick up these folks.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Oh, since I have three clients clamoring ceaselessly leaving me email after email and voice mail after voice mail about how much work they need done...
I stopped handing out my card to people. I am tired of saying to people: "No, I like my job, no, I'm not interested, etc."
You know, it's better to hire 1 guy 1t 1 million per year who is worth it than 100 people at $10K/yr. Yes they can code faster. But can they code smarter?
I say that a programmer who has the spacial breadth to come up with oo and a programming language can pro... Say, name 1 programming language "made in india" that's in widespread use... Didn't think so.
"Piter, too, is dead."
Mostly what it means is that HP obviously doesn't have any long term vision anymore, and are probably very much on the way out.
About seven years ago I was a sub-sub-contractor working on a project for HP. A minor style issue came up on the documents I was formatting style sheets for: should there be a hyphen here or not? When I asked my contact at HP, he said: "I'll have to ask the committee about that."
I thought: This company is doomed!
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
I don't find this hard to believe at all. HP's not in the blue-sky R&D business, and hasn't been for many years now.
What I don't get, is why he ever went to HP in the first place.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
This is the difference between a company and a business. A business is a company that has found its cash cow, and firmly opposes any further research or innovation that does not serve that golden calf. New technologies are particularly opposed, as they tend to change the business model, which requires the company to adapt (horrifying word to mba's btw, it requires thinking), to recreate the original, and beautiful, holy equilibrium, allowing the business to slowly move on, possibly growing into associated markets, without anything ever actually changing.
Technology is only good as long as it can be seen as an evolutionary step, and is almost exlcusively performed by the marketing department, leading to the terms "new and improved", and "version 2.0"(heh, or "XP").
Change is bad, Microsoft blew $5B on the Xbox project so far simply to keep sony from possibly threatening the windows empire with the ps2.
Fear change, go with the names you trust, these are not the droids you are looking for.
And the band played on.
The first rule of USENET is you do not talk about USENET.
OOP there it is.
OOP there it is....
OOP
OOP
But it's not a troll. It's a fact!
CS majors are smart people, but the US economy is dying for innovating marketing and business people to help them resell existing shit.
The only time I have seen US CS majors gain immediate value is when they go abroad. There are plenty of companies in China, India, HK, Canada, Australia that would love to get their hands on top CS majors from the US.
If he can make HP slightly more profitable for two years then he is better than Carly even if he is less educated. As a rule, BODs don't make good turnaround CEO picks as they often want someone who will see things like they would like it seen,not someone who is going to do what needs doing to make things work. Then at the oppisite end you get the BODs that picked "Chainsaw Al" Dunlap (who was a criminal in CEO's clothing) and pretty much answered to no one and had a iron fist.
Maybe in the next design cycle
Doubtful. Fiorina was brought in due to an existing and expanding culture of short-sighted management. Alan's departure is just the "other shoe dropping" on this phenomenon. Quick gain at the expense of long-term viability was the strategy. Having been in difficult strategic situations (e.g. totally screwed cashflow due to bad corporate decisions and totally hosed overhead), I've had to totally gut long-term plans to keep operations alive. HP has been in that situation for quite sime time, but in my assessment, had the bulk and time of a couple of years to pull out a strategic reorg. Alan should have been a real asset there, IMHO. Hell, a crazy idea might have been banking on Alan's agent driven systems idea, acquire Sun and incorporate Bill Joy's Jini vision as a mechanism to pull this off. Then again, this is a radical move for a tired old, worthless integrator. Now they're tossing him out, it is time for any investor to dump. Trust me... your stock is worthless in bankruptcy (I've been there) and where HP is going, you won't want to follow.
All things considered, they may deserve it due to their anti-customer culture. Consider HP's approach on inkjet printer cartridge auto-expiration, for example. I'll never forget the experience two years ago when I went through an entire cabinet of cartridges only to discover that every single new replacement was reported to be empty by the printer. We usually buy packs of ten at a time, and the particular printer we had ten for was my desktop inkjet (I'm the CTO and got one a little different than the run of the mill). As I usually used the laserjet for my black and white stuff, I didn't go through cartridges very fast. Every single one in the cabinet had self-expired, even though they were packed with ink.
Guess who banned HP from any further purchases? And not just printers. If they're going to play those games in software drivers, they're not going to be in my shop. Period. I wonder how many "former geek now CTO" vendor nightmares like me there are out there?
In 1998 through 2001, I had a $110 million capital budget. After Lucent screwed me with product after product that failed to deliver (and they had the balls to come to me to sell consulting at outrageous rates to fix what they had originally sold me but didn't work). I banned Lucent from our shop and I'm happy to see many others did the same. Bad vendors deserve to die.
HP is just the latest short-sighted "screw the customer" vendor to discover we pay their paychecks. I love the look on their faces when they suddenly discover that, come back in to recover their business with me, and I take them on the tour of failed projects and products of theirs. By the time I'm done with the rep, I've got them running to monster.com to find another job from the outright despair they experience.
The big picture is this: in IT, Clayton Christensen has pointed out that our company lifecycles are more like fruit flies than most other companies. The upside of this is that we get to see the crummy vendors suffer the consequence of their actions in very little time. Datapoint, Sun (still dying but fighting like mad - I helped kill one of their product lines, yea!), NeXT, Be, Data General, CDC, Inacom, Sequent, RealSCO, DEC (to my disappointment), and countless others all suffered the consequence.
So who's next? I can't believe Sun can hang on forever. HP's become little more than a final assembly manufacturer and will suffer Inacom's fate. Gateway has to be on its last hours. Who else am I overlooking?
I know this won't be a popular sentiment, but I think it's worth writing, so here goes...
You want to get into computer science? Look what happens to a winner of the Turing Award. Computer science, programming, and just about anything related to computers is now passe. It's no longer a book of spells from which you cast great power. It is a hack-n-slash battle of attrition. "Just get it done" is the new methodology. R&D is old school.
Everyone wants to launch in against HP or the corporation in general for this, but this doesn't surprise me. Guys like Kay are better suited in academia anyways.
HP's not in the blue-sky R&D business, and hasn't been for many years now.
Not true at all. I worked for HP Labs last summer in their Information Dynamics Lab. Much of the research that this group, and others that I'm personally aware of, does is of a distinctly speculative nature and doesn't directly lead to a product. This is fine by HP, because pure research generally pays off in one way or another in the long run.
Corporate blue-sky R&D doesn't generally make the papers until it's no longer blue-sky, i.e., just because you don't see it happening doesn't mean it's not there. If you want to know who's doing research, try reading the scientific literature instead, .
Spoken like someone who is afraid to tackle my arguments head on. I have been outside of this country. And you have not rebutted a single thing I said.
Go visit North Korea, Cuba, or one of the former Soviet states and then tell me how the environment looks over there. If you think "corporations" make you weep... all I can is, you need to get out more.
Hmm.... so the only other solution than capitalism is communism, huh? You are a tool. Did you read anything that I wrote? I'm aiming for what is beyond capitalism - the next step. Communism is clearly a failure (and was never implemented fully anyway). Both systems are bad for the environment, and both are repressive - communism is just more obviously repressive. Capitalism is much more subtle and insidious, but it at least allows for greater freedom.
If you've finished attacking me, you might want to consider some possible alternatives; something that hasn't been done before. I think the answer is largely political. If we used a direct democracy approach, with a firm structure for protecting minority opinion we'd see a less oppressive system, methinks. We could vote on laws, rather than voting on greedy politicians who vote on laws for us (or 'for themselves', more accurately). I think it's time we progressed beyond greed as a motivating factor, since it is so obviously divisive. But if you think capitalism is the pinnacle of human endeavor, please tell me why.
Electric Monkey Pants
Alan Kay has been a source of great ideas and he's a nice guy too. I agree we owe him a debt and I hope he is rich. That said, has anybody here actually looked at his work over the last ten or 15 years? It's a very specialized kind of thing he's into and it's not my cup of tea and it is easy to understand how HP might feel it's not theirs either. Disney seemed to feel the same way. Before you go flaming HP you might want to do some minimal background research on re. the last decade, as opposed to the glory days of 1970.
Look at how computers are built, however. It's all Legoed components. I doubt you'll see much lucrative innovation from anything remotely close to the "home/office PC" industry.
The big innovation is going to be with the component producers, both internal and peripheral.
Also, software will continue to be a big place for innovation, although its (general) lack of large required material investment (you really don't need fab plants or high-priced prototypes for innovating software), leads to lower overall prices and less payoff for one particular invention.
The general-purpose computer of today doesn't need innovation. There is still has mountains of potential to tap with the common PC. The fact that you can completely emulate complete machines (and not just computers) of only a few years ago on a modest modern machine tells the power and versatility that's out there with current general-purpose machines. Why innovate, when we still haven't cleaned the plates we have?
Information wants to be free.
Entertainment wants to be paid.
You just want to be cheap.
Smalltalk didn't catch on, not due to problems with dynamic typing, or the language itself, but mostly because of lack of availability.
The PC was a huge success despite being inferior to Macs at the time, mostly due to the closed nature of Apple. Developers weren't able to create software or hardware without paying royalties. Often the price increase was passed on to the consumer, and software packages were noticeably more expensive than their PC counterparts. PCs developed a swelling shareware and BBS culture, and soon overtook the Mac.
This is much the same situation as what happened with smalltalk.
I'm sure anyone who has ever used a smalltalk system can hardly deny its simplicity, and elegance, compared to that of C++ or even Java. The problem really existed in the fact that smalltalk wasn't available cheaply. It was heavily controlled by Xerox, and compilers for it tended to be far too expensive for novice programmers, or startup companies, to afford.
Sun released Java out to the public, and supported it documentation-wise. It allowed third party vendors to create compilers, and development environments, royalty free.
Smalltalk is still, in many ways, superior to Java. It supports functional programming using code-blocks, a feature Java tries to emulate using anonymous inner classes (but which ends up being clunky and slow). It supports generic programming naturally, since code will simply work if the objects it is working with have all of the required interface. A great deal of doors are opened in the Object-Oriented paradigm when you include dynamic typing.
The static typing provided in C/C++ is pretty weak compared to that in Ocaml or SML. In practice, it tends to step on your toes a great deal more than help you create a well-defined error free program. Smalltalk can make use of type inference analysis the same way Ocaml does. Most runtime-errors will reveal flaws in your code, and static analysis can weed out the rest. In the end, the advantages of dynamic programming are pretty considerable.
Smalltalk has actually, over the past couple of years, began to build up a bit of steam. Some open-source implementations have been popping up here and there.
For an example of the power of Smalltalk, check out the open-source Squeak project: www.squeak.org
I'm a big fan of Java, but maybe even a bigger fan of Smalltalk. I think after playing around with it a bit, it will become apparent to anyone that they seem to have very little in common.
Proably wont win any karma for saying this but what exactly has Alan Kay done in like the last 20 years. If you read his HP bio there isn't really anything in there exciting thats happened after like 1980. Smalltalk was ground breaking and all, a great language, its fun to trash C++, and many other have built on his work, but how many of you have written any Smalltalk code lately.
A problem with gray beards in ivory tower research divisions, is sometimes they start puttering on things that amuse them but never transition that in anything of real world value, and especially something that can someday be turned in to a product a company can sell. Not saying thats the case here, maybe they have been doing revolutionary stuff and HP is shooting itself in the foot with this move. Advanced research is hard to pass judgement on but, you know, someday they you to produce something to justify the years of investment or its axed. Its irresponsible management to pour money in to something with no return, even if its not a near term return. For example what did this HP group do while SUN was inventing Java and Microsoft C#.
@de_machina
After all, the Smalltalk branch of OOP philosophy is the driving force behind Objective-C and Cocoa. And Apple is really starting to do some interesting work in advancing the usefulness of computers, which is right up Kay's alley.
HP stock dives when Lexmark sells 3 printers. Because HP is just a printing company.
HP stock dives when Dell changes their standard chassis color. Because HP is just a PC company.
HP stock dives when IBM does some new services campaign. Because HP is just a consulting company.
HP stock dives because they announce a new technology out of HP Labs. Because Dell doesn't have R&D, they save all that cash. HP is stupid for spending on that when they could just repaint Intel systems.
HP stock dove this week because somebody leaked that they'd lay off 25,000 people. When it ended up only being 14,500, HP just wasn't serious about cutting costs.
I am not saying that HP is fantastic, I am just saying that to call them just a PC company is silly. We all know that two articles from now (since there will be a dupe of this one before the next new article) it will be about printing, and everybody will say how HP is going to die since all they do is make printers...
It will be an interesting year for HP. By 6/1/06, the company could look completely different.
And one thing to consider, no computer seller is an engineering company any longer. Dell never was, Lenovo isn't going to be, Gateway isn't.
Agilent is the engineering half of HP.
My mom says I'm cool.
Do you think that any geek who achieves momentary fame should have a job for life? Don't you think an employee should be measured by the value he's contributing now?
When I heard "Alan Kay" I remembered this load of whining. Here's my comment on that.
I have more respect for people who actually get things done, like the Linux kernel contributors, than people who pontificate on the future of OO or whatever. Anyone claiming that HP should keep this guy because of his long-past accomplishments should have his head examined. HP should only retain people who help the company make money and move forward.
DEC had a huge research empire. CRL in MA, handy
for the MIT diaspora. WRL in Palo Alto for the
Stanford diaspora. And then for added flavour
SRC a block down from WRL, created so that Bob
Taylor could employ the PARC diaspora (Thacker,
Lampson). What good did it do them? A lot of
work on X --- the xterm(1) manual page has people
from all three, I think. Alta Vista, which Mike
Burrows and others did at SRC. Brian Reid did a
load of interesting stuff at WRL. Lamport was
at SRC at various points, for which us LaTeX users
give much thanks. I'm told SRC people bailed
the Alpha design out at various points. But after
that? At least a thousand man-years to produce...?
Compaq kept it all going, but HP already had labs
in Palo Alto and Bristol. How many research
operations does a PC maker with a shrinking
server market need? To do what?
ian
On the topic of corporate mistakes, one of my favorites is IBM and GE (and others, but I don't know who) turning down the patent for photocopying when its inventor offered it to them. They didn't think there was a market for copiers.
I don't know if he is 'the messiah', but often a sick corporation needs radical pruning to survive.
And, quite oftem, sick corporations accumulate deadwood, so it's would be a good idea even if survival weren't at stake.
Layoffs also increase the productivity of those remaining, at least in the short term, out of raw fear. Nothing focuses the mind like the prospect of being terminated.
That honor goes to Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard, the designers of Simula. Simula had a strong effect on both Kay and Smalltalk.
I'm at OLS and the rumour is that Keith Packard and Jim Gettys are also going.
Yes, you made up some statistics and then didn't back them up. When I challenged you on that you said:
As to the stats, Google your own research and add up your own numbers for a change.
No. You are the one making these claims, it's your responsibility to back them up. As for me, I did do some googling and I came up with this interesting tidbit:
So, basically, you're just wrong. You live in fantasy-land, where poor people are rolling around in Microsoft stock. Keep dreaming. Oh, and here's the link. I'm still waiting for your link, but somehow I doubt it will arrive since your numbers and your beliefs are based on fantasy. You desperately wish that the current system was fair, but it is not. What I find interesting is that the bottom 80% are people who actually own stock. There are many people out there who don't own stock in a single company. To try and find out what percentage of people owned stock I did some more research since you are too lazy and dishonest, and I found this:
So, only around 50% of the population actually owns any stock. That seems to directly contradict what you wrote earlier, and I quote: "public at large owns about 60% of all the stocks in this country." The only thing I wonder is whether you were mistaken or lying.
And just to return the favor, you sound like a common, garden-variety anarchist, forever ranting against the "system", and always advocating the destruction of that which he's unable to understand, to be replaced by a uptopian... something, that he's always not quite able to elucidate.
For the record, I am not an anarchist, but being called one is a refreshing change from being called a commie. I guess it's clear that you are totally wrong by now, even to you. You are the one who does not understand the system. The fact is, I do understand the system, and that's why I want to change it. Your ignorance (and others like you), appalling enough as it is, results in the perpetuation of an unfair and unjust system that could be either scrapped completely or radically reformed. I would prefer we start over, but that does not seem feasible at the moment. I think we should at least try to g
Electric Monkey Pants
Operational excellence is not innovation. Quit diluting the meaning of words. Innovation means "introducing something new". If Dell introduced a different, cheaper way to put together computers, it would be innovation. If they found a cheaper supplier, it's good business but it's not innovation.
Anyway, it's not Dell who lowered prices, but rather the chip industry. They are the actual innovators here -- chip density increased more than 10-fold in the last 15 or so years, which is the sole reason for price reductions. If a processor and motherboard combo still cost $500 (which is what I paid in 1995), Dell would still be building $1000 computers.