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Right at the start, Kay pointed out that the innovation to get from Alto to Macintosh took more work than inventing the Alto. I don't think he was ignoring that. His point might be that someone was bound to do the innovation, but it took very deliberate choices for PARC to situate themselves where the invention was possible.

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Good point. I would still say that the route "from Alto to Macintosh" is thinking more in IQ terms and that the full path, Alto to Macintosh to market, is frequently underestimated. I had a feeling that while Kay may have appreciated the first half, the second half was rather absent in his talk and he kept presenting it as though the software they built was sold ten years later by somebody else. For example saying that Microsoft took Bravo and sold Word.

What Microsoft did was hire Charles Simonyi in order to productize the research into Word

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