please link to the original article

I received the article via e-mail and don't have the actual link. Below is the full article if you want it.

A PC Pioneer Decries the State of Computing 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.
> Jul 08 2004
> By David Kirkpatrick
> Fortune.com
>
>
>
> I 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.
> Visit FORTUNE.com
>  

the article is here (found through a quick google search):
http://www.fortune.com/fortune/fastforward/0,15704,661671,00.html