You are impressively wrong. He just wrapped up an incredible research program that demonstrated many concrete implementations of great computing ideas.
> After 16 years of continuous research and important contributions toward its mission - "Improve 'powerful ideas education' for the world's children and to advance the state of systems research and personal computing" - Viewpoints Research Institute concluded its operations at the beginning of 2018.
And what exactly is the output, other than talks and some programming learning tools for children? I haven't seen any significant new insights or advances.
> And what exactly is the output, other than talks and some programming learning tools for children?
The papers and demos are the output. They were a research outfit, not a startup. OP claimed that Kay "never offers anything but the most vague suggestions" when he (et. al.) provided several very concrete working demos. It's hardly his fault if no one took him up on them, is it? (FWIW I suspect some of their work had an effect on MS Word & Excel UI but I don't know for sure.)
> I haven't seen any significant new insights or advances.
Where have you looked? Did you read the papers that VPRI published? OMeta has been mentioned else-thread, I like that Nile programming language, the COLA system seems neat.
> After 16 years of continuous research and important contributions toward its mission - "Improve 'powerful ideas education' for the world's children and to advance the state of systems research and personal computing" - Viewpoints Research Institute concluded its operations at the beginning of 2018.
http://www.vpri.org/