For all the respect and admiration I have for Alan Kay, I think he's often showing a lot of bad faith.
His ideal vision is always described in very abstract terms. If he took the care to write it down precisely, what it should look like, I'm sure there would be hundreds eager to build it for him. Of course, part of it is "design principles". But then do some common use cases.
When the abstraction meets reality we get comments like "the iPad should have a pen". Which is really an interesting observation, but doesn't quite rill the crowd like the abstract impressive-sounding stuff does. And you'd hardly call these isolated observation "vision".
Clearly, the user interfaces we have today are sub-optimal, and I can make hundreds of factual remarks on what could be improved. But I don't think this works out to a "vision". In fact, a vision is I think sometimes bound to be too abstract. If we just had products where the shit was fixed relentlessly, I reckon we'd get to "good" without needing them.
His ideal vision is always described in very abstract terms. If he took the care to write it down precisely, what it should look like, I'm sure there would be hundreds eager to build it for him. Of course, part of it is "design principles". But then do some common use cases.
When the abstraction meets reality we get comments like "the iPad should have a pen". Which is really an interesting observation, but doesn't quite rill the crowd like the abstract impressive-sounding stuff does. And you'd hardly call these isolated observation "vision".
Clearly, the user interfaces we have today are sub-optimal, and I can make hundreds of factual remarks on what could be improved. But I don't think this works out to a "vision". In fact, a vision is I think sometimes bound to be too abstract. If we just had products where the shit was fixed relentlessly, I reckon we'd get to "good" without needing them.