HP Fires Father of OOP 697
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."
And... (Score:2, Insightful)
HP Slogans (Score:4, Insightful)
HP Invent ---- Isn't that hard without inventors ?
Re:And... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Or maybe IBM, Novell or Redhat :-) (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Wow. (Score:1, Insightful)
Tell Hurl (Hurd) to fire another 100K employees or so and maybe he'll have a profitable rest of his business.
What's the big fuss? (Score:2, Insightful)
Not hard to believe (Score:1, Insightful)
How old is this guy? How much does he make? How many years until he retires? How many more great ideas can they expect to get out of him in the time he has left?
These are suits. Not nice guys. That's how they think.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
HP doesn't need Kay. (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
mod points be damned (Score:3, Insightful)
Dude! We Only Need One Dell! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Boycott HP.. Horrible company (Score:5, Insightful)
HP has obviously abandoned the USA and it's time we abandon this dying company.
Re:And... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:And... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:wtf is hp thinking? (Score:3, Insightful)
Already done several years ago. It's called Agilent.
SirWired
Re:And... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:And... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:And... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Don't dog Dell (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Every one knows Carly was out of her mind.. (Score:1, Insightful)
So they're just going to imitate and try to cut margins to stay competitive. Welcome to the new face of HP, mediocre at best. Their riding on the coattails of geniuses that used to represent HP, betting that the brand's name will continue to sell products. The name itself though was not built on the commodity hardware that they are aiming at now, so I wonder just how well this will work. The awe for HP among techies is gone, and I don't get the impression HP is highly coveted brand among regular folks. Except for maybe printers, but Dell and others are now nipping at that cash cow, offering cheaper and equivalent alternatives.
I predict the executives will continue to run the present course, making big promises from a name that no longer represents the competence it used to. The stock price will make a run up, and the executives will take home big checks as they leave for other positions or retirement.
This [yahoo.com] yahoo groups posting says it all.
I'll excerpt:
"The company is scambling to try to prove that its failed direction regarding the CPQ merger was the right decision.
For the board of directors to conceed their failure now would result in the call for each of their resignations and so they are either unwilling or unable to accept their defeat.
They must band together with a secret oath of loyalty now in order to protect the status quo."
You can't be serious. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:HP Slogans (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
Re:Favorite Alan Kay Quotation (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:And... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:HP doesn't need Kay. (Score:2, Insightful)
So, some of those bright guys got the idea, back when mini computers were new, that they could out-engineer any other three crowds of engineers around. And they were right. HP computers were really competitive and, so long as it took serious engineering to get this stuff out the door, they did well. That part of the company balooned out of recognizability while the test equipment guys kept on doing what they could do best. It ended up with the tail wagging the dog, where the computer business was bringing in tons more than the test equipment business.
Well, the computer guys (who were, by now, in charge) decided to split off the "unprofitable" test equipment crowd. Dumb move. All that top engineering talent, cutting their teeth on advanced and crazy ideas, went away. In the next stroke the PC business became a commodity business. HP isn't making the motherboards any more -that stuff is being done by 3rd parties in Taiwan and China. All they are is system integrators. And there's system integrators all over the world who charge the same or less than HP. There's no "in front" any more, when PC's are heading for appliance status. What have they become? Printer ink purveyors! And that's going to last right up to the day when some electronics vendor dumps out a decent printer with cheap ink. At which point the ink business dries up, the PC business has moved into the supermarket margin business (and that gets whupped by Levono and others running in China), and the whole place goes under.
The old HP, now named "Agilent", is doing fine, creative work and is healthy. Heck, they should have named the computer company Agilent and let the old company keep the name.. But, I guess, the HP name had more brand recognition as a computer company than the company that made spectrum analyzers.
I'm not surprised that the new HP is getting rid of R&D staff. They'll chug everything except the system integrators.. And they only need a thousand of those or so (or less), the techs on the other side of the support line, and the guys who run the warehouses. If they want to beat Dell, they only probably need to have their real R&D in Taiwan, where the motherboard manufacturers are. Maybe a couple of tech writers who know English, and they're done. Maybe 5,000, 10,000 people, and that's it. Max. Before they fold.
K. Becker (Ex old-HP summer hire and HP2903 circuit thrasher.)
But what HAS Alan Kay done? (Score:1, Insightful)
I don't understand.
Employees shouldn't be allowed to rest on their laurels due to 20 year old achievements accomplished working for another company. HP is no longer in a position to be Santa Claus.
Employees in a company really need to be contributing in some way to the benefit of the company, or they should switch to a university. Reading some of the comments written by or about Alan Kay, he seems to be a bit arrogant actually.
Re:But what HAS Alan Kay done? (Score:2, Insightful)
They dont need some self-proclaimed visionary to sit around and philosophize without contributing anything tangible to the bottom line and probably demand some ridiculous salary.
Investors and other employees who WORK all day would probably see this as a good thing for the company.
Geeks should look at this news and learn an important lesson. Your employment is based on what you can do for the company, and more to the point, how you can make money for the company.
Oh ye of li'l faith. (Score:3, Insightful)
The interesting thing is that these databases represented about 1,200 relationships between these objects. (Note the difference in scale. There were two to three times as many relationships as there were objects. And they NEVER understood what they were dealing with. Relationships and extremely simple to implement, but you have to see that that bricks and mortar [the objects] do not a wall make [the relationships].)
Now, how do you visualize 750 objects at once?
It certainly doesn't fit on a flat sheet of paper. ERWin just doesn't cut it.
You have to use 3D (I did it with VRML) then topologically sort the objects and the relationships and then array the whole thing on the 'surface' of nested spheres. (The 'depth' of the sphere depends on the relationships that are being followed. GFDM was eight levels deep. 'Real world' objects were modeled on the outermost sphere.)
Each object was linked to a page describing the object and the lines represented the relationships and were linked to a page describing the relationships.
I was really PROUD of coming up with the visualization scheme and with the grunt work I had to do to come up with the bizzare quaternion math for arraying the objects on the nested spheres and for aligning the relationships.
The relationships were conceptually easier, (though if I had prettied them up to follow traces and arcs it would have been a test of the 4-colour map theorem.
3D enabled me to be the ONLY person to understand ALL of the objects and their relationships. I had ALL the meta-data available at the click of my mouse.
This could have been extended to have interfaces to manipulate (edit) the objects and the relationships themselves.
I did none of this for the 'cool' factor, but because it was the only possible way to handle that much meta-data.
Re:Don't dog Dell (Score:3, Insightful)
No, they didn't get lucky. I'm guessing maybe you're too young to remember the degree to which Michael Dell revolutionized PC manufacturing, marketing and sales when he started the company. Sure, today, they're just exploiting the hell out of the model that Michael Dell set up, but luck had very little to do with it. Microsoft got lucky, with the whole IBM deal and the monopoly thing. Dell did something quite rare: built a major business from scratch in a highly competitive market, achieving success the old-fashioned way: out-competing his competitors.
Re:Coined and invented are two different things (Score:5, Insightful)
They both died in 2002.
Lately I have heard more than once that Alan Kay is the father of Object Oriented programming. But it seems he is the father of dynamic object oriented programming. At least that is what Wikipedia say. Why is the world already forgetting Nygaard and Dahl?
Spoken like a true idiot. (Score:3, Insightful)
Spoken like a true idiot. All stockholders are not "tremendously rich". In fact, the public at large owns about 60% of all the stocks in this country in direct ownership, mutual funds, retirement funds, and pension funds. Then add in insurance companies who invest premiums to have the money to pay claims... and banks who invest savings to pay interest and make loans... and...
I'd say you get the idea, but I'm pretty sure you don't.
So let's do away with savings accounts, mutual funds, pension funds, health, life, home, and car insurance, and all those other things made possible by stockholder ownership in those nasty, greedy, hateful corporations. Hell, half the U.S. population won't mind having their savings and retirement accounts wiped away.
Will they?
Idiot.
Re:And... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Yet More HP Slogans (Score:5, Insightful)
Guys, guys, be aware of your history. The 'virtual machine' has been around since at least 1966 [wikipedia.org]. The concept of a virtual machine which was the common host to multiple languages has been around since at least 1977 [wikipedia.org]. Automatic memory management and garbage collection has been around since I was a small child [wikipedia.org].
Don't get me wrong. I like Java. I make my living out of Java. But Sun didn't 'invent' Java. Nothing in the conception of the Oak (later Java [wikipedia.org]) platform was either new or innovative. Java was a nice, clean implementation of some well known programming techniques which got a good marketing push behind it.
As for C# - indeed the whole .net platform - it is a very straight copy of Java. Virtually nothing - from the syntax of the C# language to many of the opcodes of the virtual machine - has changed. These things are not 'innovations' or 'inventions'. They're technology as usual; building on and refining what went before in quite small increments.
By contrast, Smalltalk genuinely was innovative. It was the first fully object oriented language. It used a virtual machine, but was the first virtual machine language which had a JIT [wikipedia.org]. Don't devalue inventions. Inventions (especially in software) are rare; there have been only about half a dozen genuine software inventions since 1960, and Smalltalk definitely counts as one of those.
Re:Oh, and... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:But what HAS Alan Kay done? (Score:1, Insightful)
Employees shouldn't be allowed to rest on their laurels due to 20 year old achievements accomplished working for another company
Actually the problem is that the industry has STILL not reached the time where 20 years old innovation is used. Smalltalk and Squeak are still in advance on current language. HP could have made and marketed a dumbed down version of Java. HP could have made the excellent Smalltalk-based IBM Java/Smalltalk tools. But, they chose not. Why are the employee supposed to change research topics, when the innovations they proposed 20 years ago are still not present in current products?
Re:Yet More HP Slogans (Score:4, Insightful)
My exact thoughts...
Get real, they were hardly groundbreaking languages. Java basically wanted to move into that OOPish, procedural language niche C++ occupied, without having to deal with C++'s steep learning investment, and to be a bit more RAD-like in usage, hence its interpreter based origins. The only thing that could be described as cutting edge would be its compiler, but that was hardly an original idea. Microsoft was even less original, they just wanted the same things Java aimed for, and usurp Java from the "backoffice".
Its like saying C was an incredibly original language. No, it was based heavily on the procedural language theory; PASCAL (ugh) could be considered genuinely original. C was implemented to be a practical language; addressing the computing limitations of machines in its day, and be "simple" enough to make it portable over different architectures.
Java & C# was not research; they were marketing driven language designs that catered to less talented programmers. Much like how programmers abandoned assembler programming for COBOL and FORTRAN. (though FORTRAN was a language breakthrough.) Its wasn't the HP research group's job to do technical marketing. Its not RESEARCH. Its the job of the CTO/CEO to decide what research projects to fund, and thus the research direction. But its not to have a distinct payoff in five years. That's not research.
Its like chess. You use the computers to number crunch the advantageous plies. But that's not advancing chess theory. (Good) Human players aren't supposed to be looking only 4 moves, and then go to the next 4 moves. Humans are supposed to evaluate sets of moves in an abstract manner, looking to make the kill 20 moves in advance. That's research.
Re:Serious? Oh, it's very serious. (Score:2, Insightful)
The way corporations operate may be bad, but it's no worse than the nobles in the monarchies of europe. Corporations made it possible for the common man to get involved in ownership of a large company, which was previously limited to only the super-rich. At least now, if I see Microsoft getting rich and I am jealous, I can just go buy a piece of Microsoft and share in the wealth.
You posit a socialist world, which Soviet Russia proved was good on paper, but a spectacular failure in practice. The Chinese are learning from the mistakes of the USSR by EMBRACING corporate capitalism while keeping the government involved.
Greed runs the world. Bitch about it all you like, but this is the way it always has been and always will be. The only way to be safe from greed is to be greedy yourself. Even if the US were to pass laws forbidding profitable corporations, nothing would change. They would simply move to China or Russia or Canada. If you are not greedy, someone else will be and you'll just be poor. If everyone is not greedy, it just takes one greedy person to amass resources and abuse power. On the other hand, if everyone is greedy, things will eventually work out.
20th century economics has taught us that governments cannot control the economy, they can only guide it. The economy is controlled by market forces; the mass will of the people. It is folly to try and "dream of a better system" because the system dictates itself. Even if you could think of something better, the goal could only be to make more money, or else nobody will bother.
Stop trolling on slashdot and go out and learn stuff about the world. We all wish for the world to be a better place but there are some facts about the world and the nature of people that we have to operate within.
Re:But what HAS Alan Kay done? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:But what HAS Alan Kay done? (Score:1, Insightful)
Boss: Ok get to work on the latest innovative product that will give us an edge since noone else has done it.
Worker: Sure thing what would that be?
Boss: F**k if I know. We fired the guy who came up with that stuff.
Re:Don't dog Dell (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:HP is a huge company.... (Score:2, Insightful)
I am not saying that HP is fantastic...
No?
Re:Favorite Alan Kay Quotation (Score:3, Insightful)
You don't hire Alan Kay to write code, you numbnut.
Why is that? Alan Kay has great influence on programming practice, shouldn't you expect him to program as well? Look at Don Knuth. He is a once-in-century figure in computer science, and is fantastically knowledgable, but he writes programs all the time [stanford.edu]. I suspect Alan Kay does as well.
Re:And... (Score:3, Insightful)
Typical short termism. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.