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HP Fires Father of OOP

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the hard-times dept.

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."

4 of 697 comments (clear)

  1. Google by Altanar · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I predict that Google announces that they hired him in a week.

  2. Re:Maybe Apple will hire him... by 0xC0FFEE · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Kay as already been at Apple, during the early Macintosh day. He's been at Xeros during the days of the Alto, worked on SmallTalk. Some people will tell you there as never been anything like it since.

    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.

  3. I'm not surprised HP is struggling by PapayaSF · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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
  4. HP is a huge company.... by attemptedgoalie · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.