“Alan Kay thinks that Apple the loss of Apple’s dynamic leader, Steve Jobs, may have left the company without a leader capable of making decisions,” Karen Haslam reports for Macworld UK.
“Kay was a key member of the Xerox PARC lab that Apple’s late co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs visited, and came away with the idea of a graphical user interface and computer mouse. Kay joined Apple as an Apple Fellow in 1984,” Haslam reports. “He also conceived the Dynabook concept, a 1972 proposal for a personal computer for children of all ages, which is predominantly what he is discussing in an interview by historian David Greelish on Techland.”
Haslam reports, “Towards the end of the interview, Kay comments that organisations like Apple: ‘Require a charismatic leader who will shoot people in the knees when needed.’ Without this leader ‘no group can come up with a good decision and make it stick just because it is a good idea,’ he adds.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Charisma is nice, but not required for Apple to thrive at this stage.
As for decision-making capabilities: Ask Scott Forstall how his knees feel.
Related article:
Alan Kay: ‘Much of the iPad UI is very poor in a myriad of ways’ – April 3, 2013
