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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."
HP Invent ---- Isn't that hard without inventors ?
This is my opinion based on what little I know and understand of the rumors and lies Thanks, Randal
Especially appropriate, now that the mother of "Oops!" is out of the picture.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
I predict that Google announces that they hired him in a week.
People wonder why no one is going into CS anymore.
If you honestly think he'll be struggling to find a well paying job elsewhere you're deluding yourself. Just because large floundering corporations are laying off good CS people doesn't mean much. 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.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
Reminds me of the "Bad Idea Jeans" SNL commercial
the HP bio on Alan Kay
"but money is the God of Algiers & Mahomet their prophet." - Rich. O'Bryen June 8th 1786
"I invented the term Object-Oriented, and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind."
- Alan Kay
I don't know if this is a true quotation, or is apocryphal, but it's good enough to throw around at random.
I'm sure Mr. Kay will not have any problem finding a job, should he so desire one. Regardless, I wish him the best of luck.
Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachtani?
www.fogbound.net
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.
I just hope development on Croquet doesn't stall now, otherwise us cyberspace-lusting techno-hopefuls will just have to wait for the inevitable (but still hopefully far-off) day where you can open Word documents and Excel spreadsheets from inside World of Warcraft.
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...is the antithesis of the Java B&D philosophy. It's an aggressively dynamically typed language, and is much more of a precursor to Python or Ruby than Java.
rage, rage against the dying of the light
That is why the Squeak license still mentions Apple
There are some excellent videos on archive.org of Alan Kay explaining some of the early GUI projects (including Xerox and the early laptop "prototype") http://www.archive.org/details/AlanKeyD1987 http://www.archive.org/details/AlanKeyD1987_2
HP doesn't need innovators like Kay. HP is totally into innovating new ways to make money off of printer consumables, and that isn't an expertise that Kay brings to the table.
HP's downfall started to happen as soon as they started selling tons of LaserJet printers.
From there, HP seemed to take a little break and brought nothing new to market. Instead of making great new products, they kept on milking the same printer lines until they got old, crusty, and expensive to operate. They tried to do the same thing with their PC line. They unloaded or failed to focus on their other product lines.
I haven't bought an HP product in years. My ex-girlfriend bought an HP inkjet printer, but it failed quickly and the consumables were ridiculously expensive. It just didn't seem like an HP quality product to me.
So HP fired Alan Kay? That's good for Alan. Because who wants to work for an ink-n-toner company?
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'll post instead of mod, but I think that /. should nix the HP logo. The entity known as "HP" is currently undeserving of any relation to the Hewlett-Packard legacy of computing, innovation, research, precision devices, calculators!, and, yes, printers. "HP" is really just a printer company now. Change the /. icon to a LaserJet or something, but "Hewlett-Packard" it's not. Okay, I have more b33r to drink...
Let's get drunk and delete production data!
Looks like Hurd is turning HP into a lean machine to be as focused on products and price as Dell currently is.
Sigh...Dell does what it does pretty well, but they are definitely not a company known for much imagination or innovation. They generally follow after someone else has blazed the path, a strategy that must fail once all of the true innovators have been eliminated. We don't really need any more Dells. If HP becomes just like Dell, then why should I buy from them? I might as well buy from Dell.
HP can still succeed, but they need to do so by being HP. Efficiency is good, but not at the expense of the good things that make HP stand out from the crowd and create future opportunities. I think farmers say that you shouldn't eat the seed corn.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
Check out some of his presentations of open croquet before you say that (see e.g. here). He is bringing the kind of OpenGL graphics that gamers have got used to into the mainstream GUI. It is among the most innovative and forward-looking interface development I've seen. Do we really think we'll be dragging windows around a 2D desktop in 30 years time?
Actually, what they meant to say was "HP Invest." Just one letter. Simple mistake, really.
Actually actually, I think it meant to say "HP Invert", as in Rectal-Cranial Inversion, which is what HP has collectively accomplished with moves like this.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
i can understand that it's really too trivial to have mentioned in his Bio intro, but Alan Kay also won some minor award recently -- think it's called the TURING AWARD. i can't imagine why anyone would want to employ such a slacker. http://internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/33425 11/
-craig
Harry Potter fires the father of the Order Of the Phoenix? Wha?
...
OH.
If you open yourself to the foo, You and foo become one.
HP laid off 15k workers, but is currently heavily recruiting engineers in India and China. Just take a look at the Job section on hp.com.
HP has obviously abandoned the USA and it's time we abandon this dying company.
Actually, what they meant to say was "HP Invest." Just one letter. Simple mistake, really.
Actually actually, I think it meant to say "HP Invert", as in Rectal-Cranial Inversion, which is what HP has collectively accomplished with moves like this.
Fact: they meant to say "HP Invect" -- that is, to issue invective.
Examples:
"Fuck you, losers -- we're better off without you!"
And:
"HP Rules! U-S-A-!! U-S-A-!!," etc.
-kgj
-kgj
People wonder why no one is going into CS anymore.
Actually employment stats bottomed in 2002 and have been picking up since. At the same time a lot of people are making the same mistake you did, which is reading too much in to the random firing.
In sum the overall picture is something like IT employment down 10% but rising back up, CS enrolment down 50% and falling.
Guess what that translates into? A shortage of CSers four years from now.
If you honestly think he'll be struggling to find a well paying job elsewhere you're deluding yourself
I'm not worried about him, I'm more worried about my own ass. If even large corporations don't need CS visionaries anymore, then CS is no longer a hot field. Thus, your main choices for a job are: coding boring business apps all day, or supporting boring and poorly written business apps all day. Real CS jobs (ones which depend on talent, rather than a "skillset" of buzzwords) are getting very difficult to come by.
HP has a fairly long history of getting rid of geniuses. Doubtlessly there are a few who remain well employed, but rejecting Wozniak and Jobs' idea for a personal computer has to rank with one of the all-time mistakes in corporate America, up there with the Coca-Cola Company not buying Pepsi when it had the chance, IBM giving a small software company a monopoly on its PC operating system, etc.
I suspect that somehow HP will muddle through, just as IBM did. They're still a good company, despite the damage Fiorina caused them with their expensive and ill-considered buyout of Compaq Computers.
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
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
This is a troll.
CS visionaries are smart people who work in a particular field. Every field of work has the same type of "real jobs" you are describing. From CS, to plumbing, to glass blowing! And that's from personal experience.
Is there anything better than clicking through Microsoft ads on Slashdot?
Dell doesn't do anything creative. They buy cheap parts and build cheap computers with them on a large scale. They have thinner margins than some competitors, but they make it up in volume and crappy support. It's not like their prices are particularly low or anything (unless they have a good combination of rebates, which can only be redeemed using small claims court).
Nothing particularly creative, it's a very straightforward and unimaginative approach that is mainly successful due to the general lack of innovation in the computer industry.
I'm assuming this is a troll.
I'm going to make that assumption, because the only other option is too depressing.
Unless you'd like a future where everything is basically owned and run--to a far greater extent than it already is--by a very small number of tremendously rich individuals, corporations are a good thing. This is because very few people actually have the resources by themselves to bankroll significant and long-lasting ventures: scientific, industrial, or otherwise.
To do big things, like build factories, operate supertankers, run airlines, you need a lot of money. Much more than any one sane person would be willing to put up. This is why corporations exist: they allow people to pool their resources, while mitigating risk. Without the shelter from liability that corporations offer, no one would invest in them. Without the great pools of capital that corporations provide, a whole lot of things that we enjoy and make life more enjoyable would disappear.
Maybe you want to live in a world without corporations, but count me out of it.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
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."
A corporation is essentially an artificial entity that cannot exist without government fiat. It's the modern day version of a chartered company. What makes a corporation legally different from a private business is that the former is a legal "person". The results on the actual owners of the corporation (shareholders) being totally absolved of responsibility for the actions of the corporation. Their share price may plummet if the company does something stupid, but they themselves are not personally responsible for their property.
That's the legal aspect of corporations, and justification enough to get rid of them. But it also introduces a subtler monkeywrench into the economy: encouraging stock ownership as an investment, which severely dilutes company ownership. There are so many owners, millions in many cases, that it's impossible for the owners to exercise control, even if they wanted to. So they elect a board of directors instead, who hires executives to actually run it.
All in all, corporations are unnatural entities. But the fix is easy, and doesn't need a new constitutional ammendment. Just rescind the current laws of incorporation. But don't expect it anytime soon. Like copyright and patents, incorporation is too useful of a fiction to abolish. You'll be fought tooth and nail from every side. Who are you going to go to for legal assistance, some non-profit corporation?
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
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.
Wasn't OO invented in northern europe the mid 60's in the Simula language by a guy named something like Nygaard?
Table-ized A.I.
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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.
the old slogan was "invent"
.....
the new slogan
"merge, layoff, and go out of business"
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
For some interesting anecdotes involving Alan
Flying is easy, just throw yourself at the ground and miss. -Douglas Adams
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.
If I was HP I would be dead scared and trying to climb desperately to the middle end!
The middle end?
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
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.
Well, let's see. Your particular solutions to the (admittedly growing) problem of corporatism in America appear to involve using force to prevent people from joining together for profit-making purposes.
He's right, you are putting up straw men because he said nothing of the sort. He specically said the the current limited-liability for-profit corporate model is broken because the current legal framework for those corps requiring profit maximization not only encourages unethical behaviour but requires often self-destructive short-term focus.
While he did put up non-profit corps as an alternative, there are others: for-profit partnerships for example. The point he argues is that the profit motive should not be divorced from responsibility for a corp's actions.
One alternative, which is certainly possible with current information systems, is to change the definition of shareholder liability in a limited-liability corporation to be capped at the share value (during ownership) or (post-divestment) all income obtained from that corporation, via both capital gains and dividends, for the result of any actions taken during the period of share ownership, regardless of whether a person is still a shareholder or has sold their shares. So you can't be a CEO/President (or majority shareholder supporting said executive), run a company into the ground through unethical practices, hide it while making a killing by selling shares through an overinflated stock price, and escaping the liability for those actions when the pigeons come home to roost.
And if you're a small shareholder (or pension manager), you'll have a lot more interest in making sure you have company directors that are providing good oversight of the executive team, instead of rubber stamping their golf club buddies.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
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
It certainly isn't about saving bandwidth--it is about forcing some people with basic, easily fixable problems to buy a new printer.
--
WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
Also, if it were that easy, you don't think all their competitors would do it?
The industry has been heading in that direction for the past 20 years or so. Dell's only achievement is finding a decent balance between price and quality.
Yeah. Thanks in large part to....Dell! They're one of a handfull of companies who have continually found ways to push margins. And when most companies start to get soft, they found ways to continually pound their competitors. That's the thing - as cheap as computers are now, they're still finding ways to make them cheaper.
They got lucky. Part of the reason they are successful is because they never innovate and spend as little as possible on engineering and R&D.
I'm guessing you're not in the business world, because crippling every single one of your competitors in an amazingly competitive industry doesn't happen through luck.
Basically, I'm pretty sure you just have a set idea of what innovation is, and that happens to coincide with pushing the technical envelope. However, the guy who invents it doesn't get it into homes. That would be the guy who figures out to make it cheaper. Dell has been that guy for the last 20 years. If it were up to IBM, PCs would still cost over $1000, which is what the bottom of the line PC cost 13 years ago when I got my first.
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.
That honor goes to Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard, the designers of Simula. Simula had a strong effect on both Kay and Smalltalk.
People like that are what keep alive your internal corporate culture.
Those are the guys that tell you where no to set your foot because they did so before and found there was a bear trap.
If you seriously are saying that HP can't find a place on their company for a guy that shaped a good part of software development carried out during the last 20 years, worldwide, then you and HP need to sit down and pause because you both are lunatics.
People like these are few per generation. I am sure other more enlightened companies (like the ones mentioned on the thread), that are actually shapping the IT world will snap him if he still feels like working.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.