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he took Alan Kay with him. Sarcasm strikes again! Kay is a living legend, since he's still alive. He's working at his own institute: http://www.vpri.org/html/p
by jmatt 18y ago
he took Alan Kay with him.
Sarcasm strikes again! Kay is a living legend, since he's still alive. He's working at his own institute: http://www.vpri.org/html/people/founders.htm http://www.vpri.org/html/people/founders.htm
[EDIT: Grammar]
- 10ren 18y agoI'm inspired by several things Alan Kay has said about commercializing technology, but it struck me: has he been involved in anything that has been commercially successful for him? The Xerox/PARC stuff famously didn't make money for Xerox; Smalltalk was not commercially successful; Squeak is not commercially successful. It seems he's great at inventing stuff, and his opinions on that are worth listening to. But he doesn't seem so great at commercializing stuff, and so perhaps I shouldn't listen to those so much (even though I find them inspiring). Has he successfully commercialized something?
- andreyf 18y agoMaybe Alan feels comfortable with his position as an innovator-sans-entrepreneur, and is contributing greatly to the world at hand? Don't get so stuck on evaluating ideas by their brand name (in this case, Smalltalk). Alan's ideas have influenced Java, Ruby, etc. considerably...
- 10ren 18y agoAs I said, Kay has invented a lot. My comment was based on his general writings, not Smalltalk. However, I agree that it's possible to have an insightful understanding of the commercialization of ideas, and to have contributed greatly to one stage, without having done all stages oneself. In a way, Alan Kay + Steve Jobs complement one another. As an example, one might see the stages of commercialization of the desktop metaphor as: PARC-->Apple-->Microsoft. Note that here commercialization means making money by getting something into the hands of more people.
- jmatt 18y agoAdd objective-c to the list, of course.