By David Kirkpatrick
Hewlett-Packard's Alan Kay, who played a pivotal role in the invention of the personal computer, says business should think more creatively about the potential of technology.FORTUNE
Thursday, July 8, 2004
SourceI have a soft spot for people who say things like "The computer revolution hasn't started yet...we're not even close to what we should have." I'm prone to agree. But when the speaker is Alan Kay, who invented a huge proportion of what we do have today, I enthusiastically grant him credence.
This is the guy who, working for the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in the late '60s and at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in the early '70s, invented or contributed heavily to the invention of: the personal computer, windows-type graphical user interfaces, personal computer networks, and object-oriented computer programming. All of these seminal creations are baked into today's computing environment, which Kay casually disparages. They say that great inventors are often easily dissatisfied. An hour or so with Kay would suggest there's truth in that.
Kay is now a senior fellow at HP Labs, where he continues his work. I was talking to him recently, though, because he has just been awarded an extraordinary trio of prizes—sort of a triple crown of computing—in honor of his many years of extraordinary breakthroughs. First, in February, he was one of four former PARC researchers to be given the nation's top engineering award—the Charles Stark Draper Prize—by the National Academy of Engineering. Then in April the Association for Computing Machinery gave him its Turing Award, sometimes called the "Nobel Prize of Computing." Finally, in June, he won the annual Kyoto Prize given by the Inamori Foundation of Japan, which comes with a cash award of approximately $450,000 and aims to recognize those who not only contribute to technical progress but also to "human development." This is a man with plenty of laurels to rest on.
But I was struck most by how much he thinks we haven't yet done. "We're running on fumes technologically today," he says. "The sad truth is that 20 years or so of commercialization have almost completely missed the point of what personal computing is about."
But what about all those great things he invented? Aren't we getting any mileage from all that? Not nearly enough, Kay believes. For him, computers should be tools for creativity and learning, and they are falling short. At Xerox PARC the aim of much of Kay's research was to develop systems to aid in education. But business, instead, has been the primary user of personal computers since their invention. And business, he says, "is basically not interested in creative uses for computers."
If business users were less shortsighted, Kay says, they would seek to create computer models of their companies and constantly simulate potential changes. But the computers most business people use today are not suited for that. That's because, he says, today's PC is too dedicated to replicating earlier tools, like ink and paper. "[The PC] has a slightly better erase function but it isn't as nice to look at as a printed thing. The chances that in the last week or year or month you've used the computer to simulate some interesting idea is zero—but that's what it's for."
Kay also decries what he sees as a fundamental failing of the web—it is primarily an environment for displaying information, not for authoring it. "You can read a document in Microsoft Word, and write a document in Microsoft Word. But the people who did web browsers I think were too lazy to do the authoring part."
Though Kay claims he's "not trying to sound like a crab here," he does border on it, especially when shortly thereafter he asserts "pretty much everything that's believed is bullshit."
But a man like this cannot be dismissed merely because he occasionally creeps toward arrogance. What's much more important is that he does not merely complain. He has a vision and a team working to bring his alternate vision to reality. Over the past three decades Kay has worked at Apple, Atari, Disney and now Hewlett-Packard. Some of the researchers in his team have moved with him from company to company. At HP, he may have found the best fit yet. The world's second-largest computing company, it has the deepest pockets of any research outfit he's ever worked for, and far more ways to bring innovations to the market.
So what is Kay trying to build now? Nothing less than "a new way of doing objects, operating systems, and networks, that makes use of the infrastructure we already have." Kay's ultimate dream is to completely remake the way we communicate with each other. At the least, he wants to enable people to collaborate and work together simply and elegantly. For him, "the primary task of the Internet is to connect every person to every other person." In techie terms, he is working on an infinitely scalable system for "real-time immersive collaboration done entirely as peer-to-peer machines." In other words, a system by which anybody could connect to anybody else at any time without having to go through some server.
To get a taste of what kind of world Kay thinks is possible instead, go to Squeakland.org and download a free, open-source program called Squeak. Calling it a program is probably an insult. Kay, its primary progenitor, calls it "a language, a tool, an environment primarily designed to help children and change the way learning is done." It is a version of the Smalltalk object-oriented programming language Kay invented years ago—and a relatively easy way for even kids to become programmers.
Squeak is primarily used today to help children visualize math and science problems in a fun way, but related tools may have far more wide-ranging uses as we move toward the more interactive Internet that Kay envisions. While Squeak is developed by Kay's nonprofit, Viewpoints Research Institute, because it is open source I wouldn't be surprised to see HP embrace it. And if Kay had his way, something that emerges from this might someday be embedded in the way we use the Internet, unleashing new levels of creativity on the web.
We should all be glad that perpetually dissatisfied guys like Alan Kay are working to make technology really pay off. I suspect his some of his award-worthy contributions to our lives are still to come.
Questions? Comments? E-mail them to me at
dkirkpatrick@fortunemail.com.