may the force be with you

Hewlett-Packard's new corporate slogan under CEO Mark Hurd's leadership may not be "invent" so much as "repurpose." A day after offering up a "research will not be cut" declaration to its plans to trim its workforce by 14,500 employees (see "Mr. Hurd, sir, come quick! The walls of the garage! They're dripping blood!"), HP did just that. In an e-mail sent to employees Wednesday morning, HP Labs Director Dick Lampman announced the cancellation of four of the company's research projects -- the Consumer Applications and Systems Laboratory, the Emerging Technologies Laboratory, the Cambridge Research Laboratory, which worked on health and wellness technology, and the Advanced Software Research team.In disbanding the last group, 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 won a Turing Award in 2003 for his work on Smalltalk, the dynamic object-oriented programming language on which Sun Microsystems' Java is modeled. Hard to believe HP's cutting him loose. But it is. According to the company, his research doesn't jibe with HP's new focus. "I was surprised by [Alan] leaving," said one HP Labs researcher who asked not to be identified. "In the last year, he was kind of the poster child of the 'HP Invent' stuff, and now all of a sudden, he's not here anymore."

source:http://blogs.siliconvalley.com/gmsv/2005/07/hewlettpackards.html