I’m an unapologetic fanboy of Alan Kay. This can be problematic given that the average person has no idea who Alan is even though they benefit from his work on a daily basis. Earlier this year, Alan presented at the Demo 2014 conference, offering his reflections and insights on the relationship between invention and innovation. It’s … Continue reading Using Moore’s Law in Reverse: Alan Kay on Invention vs. Innovation
Here’s a pointer to an excellent interview with Alan Kay. As always, Alan shares some deep insights about technology innovation and the willingness to take on risk (he’s not confident in the ability of most organizations to tolerate risk no matter how small the level of funding involved). Anyone with an interest in the continuing … Continue reading Alan Kay on innovation and risk
Alan Kay is talking once again about what went wrong with the personal computer and personal computing. Here’s a pointer to a recent interview he did with CIO Insight magazine that is well worth your attention. A CIO Insight Alan Kay was recently interviewed for CIO Insight magazine’s Expert Voices feature. In this piece entitled … Continue reading Alan Kay on learning and technology
One way to get a handle on the future of work is to get to know some of those who are already there. In the recent news about layoffs at HP, several sources noted that Alan Kay is among those getting a pink slip. It struck me that Alan is a perfect embodiment of William … Continue reading Thinkers you should know – Alan Kay
Always worth seeing what Kay has to say. The slashdot thread has its moments as well. How Heraclitus would Design a Programming Language. CowboyRobot writes “Developer of Smalltalk Alan Kay has an interview on ACM Queue where he describes the history of computing and his approach to designing languages. Kay has an impressive resume (PARC, … Continue reading Alan Kay on programming language design
One of my favorite observations, which I first heard from Alan Kay, was that “point of view is worth 80 IQ points.” Now, Alan is a very clever fellow, and it’s only just occurred to me now, but Alan never specifies a sign for those IQ points. It’s just as likely that a wrong frame … Continue reading Alan Kay and Six Sigma
I’ve been a fan of Alan Kay’s for a long time. It’s nice to see that he’s starting to develop some recent visibility in the blog world. The first thing that popped up in my aggregator a while back was this comment: Clueful markets yield good products. Here’s an “aha” quote from this interview with … Continue reading Alan Kay and Emerging Technology
Congratulations indeed! I used to wish that Alan would publish more, but I finally realized that Alan’s choice was an engineer’s choice to build stuff because it was interesting and not worry about where the credit fell. Nice to know that nice guys practicing old fashioned ways can still win after all. Congratulations Alan!. Congratulations … Continue reading Congratulations Alan!
Alan Kay has been one of my heroes for a long time. Feel free to Google him if the name doesn’t trigger anything for you. One of my favorite Alan stories comes from his early days at Xerox PARC. Xerox PARC comes from the days when smart organizations carefully walled off the crazies from the … Continue reading Asking better questions
A Brief History of a Perfect Future: Inventing the World We Can Proudly Leave Our Kids by 2050. Chunka Mui, Paul Carroll, and Tim Andrews. Full disclosure, I’ve known and worked with the authors for over twenty five years. I’m biased. Largely because I have first hand knowledge of how smart they are and how … Continue reading Review: Brief History of a Perfect Future