HP converting storied garage into recycling center
Hewlett-Packard’s new corporate slogan under CEO Mark Hurd’s leadership may not be “invent” so much as “repurpose.” A day after offering up a “research will not be cut” declaration to its plans to trim its workforce by 14,500 employees (see “Mr. Hurd, sir, come quick! The walls of the garage! They’re dripping blood!“), HP did just that. In an e-mail sent to employees Wednesday morning, HP Labs Director Dick Lampman announced the cancellation of four of the company’s research projects — the Consumer Applications and Systems Laboratory, the Emerging Technologies Laboratory, the Cambridge Research Laboratory, which worked on health and wellness technology, and the Advanced Software Research team.In disbanding the last group, 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 won a Turing Award in 2003 for his work on Smalltalk, the dynamic object-oriented programming language on which Sun Microsystems’ Java is modeled. Hard to believe HP’s cutting him loose. But it is. According to the company, his research doesn’t jibe with HP’s new focus. “I was surprised by [Alan] leaving,” one HP Labs researcher told The Mercury News. “In the last year, he was kind of the poster child of the ‘HP Invent’ stuff, and now all of a sudden, he’s not here anymore.”
I hope Apple can find a spot for Mr. Kay.
Spark: Just what I was thinking
They’d be stupid to let a guy like
that on the loose….
I think you understate Dr. Kay’s accomplishments. He is, in a very real sense, a father of modern software development. Smalltalk wasn’t just a predecessor to Java, it pioneered object oriented programming and was a predecessor to C++, C#, and just about every other OO environment out there (although most Smalltalk fans would probably tell you that more recent OO languages are half-way efforts that fall short).
Bye Bye HP!
First those jerks rename the measurement and health care machines into something no one can remember and which has no brand identification. Then they buy a computer company just as computers are becoming commodities and give it the company name. Now they are killing the research that got them where they are and destroying every bit of morale left after their stupid moves.
I hope Mr. Hurd and the rest of the top management are getting a huge bonus because of next year’s profits because after that there isn’t going to be a company to collect anything from.
I hope the 15,000(!) fired employees get together a company in HP’s business and help them achieve the bankrupcy they seem intent on causing. It is a shame that the amazing achievements of the two founders whose names are over the door have been undone by what appears to be the serial actions of two opportunistic wannabees.
I believe this also means that Jim Gettys is cut.
I do not mean to be mean..
But from the business person’s perspective what of Mr Kay’s past 20 years of research made into any commerical product?
“He is, in a very real sense, a father of modern software development. Smalltalk wasn’t just a predecessor to Java, it pioneered object oriented programming and was a predecessor to C++, C#, and just about every other OO environment out there…”
OK, if you only look at Fortran-derived languages (and ignore the lambda calculus based ones).
Aren’t you forgeting what the LISP people did? E.g. the Common Lisp folks (CLOS!)? I think they did that stuff at the same time.
Also, is C# really so great? How about ML, CML, Haskell, Scheme? At least those have things like modules, type inference, etc.
I’m not trying to take away from Alan Kay’s accomplishments. I just think you’ve ignored a huge amount of work done by folks in programming languages, for the simple reason that they didn’t trod in the footsteps of C (aka “portable assembly”).
> I do not mean to be mean..
But you are. “Gut gemeint is das Gegenteil von Gut” - means “Good intention is the opposite of good” in english.
> But from the business person’s perspective what of > Mr Kay’s past 20 years of research made into any
> commerical product?
Well, lets see
.) Objective-C is clearly inspired by Smalltalk (One
could say Objective-C is a subset of Smalltalk, put on top of plain-old C. Objective-C is the base language of NextStep and thus of Apple’s Cocoa.
You _do_ realize that Cocoa is the recommended Framework for OSX programming, do you?
.) The first GUI-System was writtin in Smalltalk,
and inspired Steve Jobs to create the Mac.
..
..
To schemelover: CLOS’ first implementation was at least 6 or 8 years behind Smalltalk. Remember the ‘Smalltalk 80′ book - that wasn’t the first version by any means.
And Xerox PARC haad an experimental Interlisp based OOP called LOOPS in about 81 or 82.
Wow
Thats like firing Michael Jordon from the Bulls front office to save $250,000 or whatever they pay this guy.
May not look increadibly stupid on paper but it is….
hey, destroying research worked sooooo well for at&t, it’s gotta work well for hp.
I thought Simula was the first OOP language?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_oriented_programming#History
Smalltalk was an incredibly important language that influenced other languages of all types — imperative as well as functional, including CLOS — in all sorts of ways. CLOS in particular came about more than 10 years later. Some references:
http://www.levenez.com/lang/history.html#08
http://people.ku.edu/~nkinners/LangList/Extras/langlist.htm
As long as they don’t fire my daddy I’ll be happy.
http://www.fotodaze.com/view.php?view=1567
Folks, if you don’t get it by now, you need to get your head out of the sand. There is no place anymore for “advanced” development/research/innovation, whatever you call it. Wall Street rewards only on efficiency and performance, not how many Ph. D’s you have, even if they invented SmallTalk or CLOS. Our industry has hit the plateau, where all that matters is how cheaply you can assemble x86 “mobo’s” in a plastic case, perhaps attached to an inkjet printer. That is all that matters. Next time you buy a Dell, praise the lord, and find a new occupation while you’re at it - this industry has died.
This is so incredibly ridiculous as to be virtually unbelievable.
As I put in in a blog posting, if you can’t find a place in your company for a guy like that, there is an enormous problem with your company.
http://www.gilgamesh.ca/?p=361
Action: Big Computer company fires 500 Ph.D.s including one famous guy.
Reaction: Blogosophere goes nuts over the famous guy.
Result: To famous guy gets another better job.
Side effect: 499 unknown, forgotten umemployed Ph.D.s
man, Fred Grott, they said he invented OOP. To say it didn’t influence Scheme, Haskell and other Functional languages is like saying he didn’t influence toster design. OOP has nothing to do with Haskell, which you should know if you knew Haskell.
im sorry … but i dont want my spaceship or heart-lung machine to run on OO code. I worry that this guy will now go out and work for a company that makes stuff I rely on. ( Luckily up to now there has been more than one printer manufacturer
)
It’s obvious that the place for folks like Alan Kay is Google…
A company who’s only profit and intrest lies in ink cartridges. Strikes me as odd that they had alan kay in the first place.
To xhi:
I suspect he was at Digital Research, which was part of DEC. Compaq bought DEC, then HP bought (or merged with, I forget) Compaq. Back in the day, DEC was a powerhouse of innovative research and products, including VMS (don’t knock it, it was impressive in its day and people still swear by it) and the Alpha processor.
Sic transit gloria mundi
The Edmonton Oilers traded Wayne Gretzky to L.A. I fail to see the difference. I’m sure Kay will end up somewhere he can do the kind of work he wants to do. Have you seen his resume?
So forget about Alan Kaye specifically for a moment. What HP or rather Mark Hurd as the new CEO is doing is facing the reality of what he has inherited. His answer is to cut cost by killing a large even majority portion of R&D. Some companies can make it quite well at “repurposing” as it was suggested but once you hit a certain size you must excel at either A) acquisition or B) innovation. Once you get really big like say GE you have to be good at both. My guess is that Mr. Hurd is swapping out a failing (over the last few years anyway) R&D organization with what will become a heavy acquisition machine. That or he’s a freakin’ nutter.
Let’s not get so melodramatic over this. Yes it seems like a bad move for a company to fire such a prominent innovator. And yes, he has made some great contributions to the field. But what has be dnoe for HP? So one company decides to axe some researchers who may have produced neglible results to the company bottom line. It almost as if HP is only interested in making money (*GASP*)!!!
I’m sure Kay will continue on and do his thing with or without HPs support. Chances are the rest of the researchers who lost jobs aren’t going to end up begging for change outside the local quickiemart.
If what you really want to do is research, stick to academia. If you want job security and some cash in the industry, then maybe learning how to make cheap plastic mobos with integrated cell phones and coffee wawrmers might be the way to go. If you are a great mind like Kay, it doesn’t really matter what you do, there is always going to a place for you.
Making proclamations like the industry is dead is just ridiculous.
>I hope Apple can find a spot for Mr. Kay.
Wasn’t Woz working for HP when he and Jobs were putting together the first Apple?
My bet is that Google will grab him before the end of next month.
As one who already got cut from HP, all I can say is “Slash & Burn in Hell HP!”
I’m sure that Hurd’s P-Scan score would explain a lot… haha.
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/96/open_boss.html
Well, Alan Kay used to be an Apple Fellow, so there might be room for him back there. Of course, Apple’s now in a make-little-widgets-and-sell-’em-fast mode, so it could be they’ve got all the researchers they need.
Alan Kay began work on Squeak (a free Smalltalk) while at Apple back in the ’90s.
Has anyone seen results from Dell’s R&D Labs? (sound of crickets here). That’s the model HP is following. Dell doesn’t invent, it rips off and delivers in an incredibly efficient supply chain model. HP’s supply chain is broken now, and has been for the past 20 years. Since Mark Hurd is an operations guy, not an inventor, he’s fixing the stuff he knows most about.
Meeting Alan Kay at Westwood Music in L.A. was my most memorable moment in 1988. The engineers who design things on an ever-smaller scale are impressive, but those who bridge the gap from binary logic to human useability are our real heroes.
This move is why HP leadership will soon learn that business savvy is an oxymoron.
While at HP, Alan Kay did his own thing (squeak, croquet) and got well-paid for it. After he’s gone, he will continue to do his own thing, presumably on someone else’s nickel. About all HP got out of him was they could trot him out in front of customers, so that he could tell them how everything good in computing was done in the 60’s by him and a few other pioneers, and everything since then has been a giant hairball that has done nothing to realize the true potential of the machine.
He’s a brilliant guy, but he’s really not interested in working for a computer company. It’s about time HP realized they were being used, and cut him loose.
I worked with Alan Kay at Apple in the early 80’s. Saw the tapes of all the great thing he’d proposed and done in the 60’s and 70’s, but never saw any great new ideas issue forth in the 80’s. His most famous works at Apple were the “1 quart gas tank” memo about how Macintosh was crippled with too little storage, and convincing Sculley to buy a Cray for 6M$ so he could simulate sharks swimming. I’d guess HP realized his best days were 40 years ago, and decided to focus on a more immediate return on investment.
Very sad that Alan Kay is dropped from HP’s payroll. Sometimes, the intangibles are just as important as the tangibles, and news like that can hurt HP’s brand. I believe BusinessWeek has the Top 100 Global Brands Scorecard with data provided by Interbrand, which reveals the rank and brand value situation of HP.
I worked closely with Alan for over a decade at Apple. The man is brilliant. Anyone who discounts his contributions to personal computing, including coining the term itself, needs to think a bit deeper. His contributions to the PC should be acknowledged for a lifetime. Alan did, after all, invent the GUI that everyone now takes for granted: overlapping windows, pull-down menus, the use of icons to launch applications. And by the way, he invented a minor programming language called Smalltalk. With the mentality of ‘what have you done for me lately, perhaps we should also discount the contributionns of Doug Engelbart who invented the mouse. What has Doug ‘done for us lately’ is ludicrous. These men paved the path for personal computing. Their contributions are enormous. Credit should be given where due. Some forward-thinking, truly innovative company will grab up Alan in no time. Another famous quote of Alan’s is “Point of View is Worth 80 IQ Points.” The new CEO of HP could use a new POV.
Firing Alan Kay is a small loss for HP. What avenue does HP have which would allow it to benefit from R&D in computing? There are really only three games in town if you are trying to innovate in computing: Microsoft, Apple and Open Source. Microsoft is sclerotic, Apple is real, but limited in size, and Open Source innovation doesn’t pay a lot.
We are back in the old IBM OS/360 days where only the bit players are innovating, but the rest of the computing world is leading a life of quiet desperation.
Who are some of you trying to fool? hp does its R&D in Asia like everyone else!
It’s hard to pay the salary of someone of Mr. Kay’s caliber when you’re selling $800 laptops (with bonus printer!) at Wal-Mart.
Being inventive, original and creative is obviously not a priority at HP.
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Related to HP’s deciciont to let go Alan Kay, the follwoing report is all the more ironic!
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/050815/lam105.html?.v=17
The one who fires Alan Kay is to be a keynote speaker on the ceremony for the Seventh Annual “Hall of Fame” for UITA. Among those enshrined in the hall of fame is — guess who — Alan Kay !