News of the project cuts was not meant to be made public but broke after an internal e-mail sent to HP workers by HP Labs director Dick Lampman was leaked to local press.

The research projects were part of HP Labs, the company’s central research organization that tends to focus on future technologies that typically are five to 10 years from commercialization. To a lesser degree, HP Labs also works with the company’s business department engineers.

On Tuesday, HP chief executive Mark Hurd announced the company is slashing 14,500 jobs worldwide as part of a major restructuring to save about $1.9bn annually. He said cuts in research would be minimal to secure the company’s foothold in tech innovation. HP Labs represents a very small fraction of the total R&D investment in HP, said HP Labs spokesperson Dave Berman.

As many as 70 employees, or 10% of HP Lab’s 700 workers, would be affected by the project cuts, Berman said. Some may find work in other HP departments, he said.

Among HP’s discontinued research projects is its Advanced Software Research group, which was investigating an operating system for the Internet, headed by legendary Silicon Valley technologist Alan Kay.

According to sources, the company would not reinstate Kay.

Kay joined HP in 2002 as a senior fellow, but may be best known for his graphical user interface work during the 1970s while at Xerox Corp’s Palo Alto Research Center. He helped create the programming language Smalltalk and was among the pioneers of object-oriented programming.

Other axed projects are HP’s Cambridge Research Lab, which focused on health-related research, its Consumer Applications and Systems Lab, and the Emerging Technologies Lab.

Berman also said some research areas within the cut projects may continue elsewhere in the company. For instance, imaging and printing research would go on, even though it previously was part of the now-defunct Consumer Applications and Systems Lab project.

[HP] will continue our research efforts in the adaptive enterprise, enabling customers to obtain greater value from their IT investments, Berman said. We will also continue our R&D in imaging and printing, and research to improve the delivery of IT services.

More forward-looking technology research, such as nanotechnology and quantum computing, also would continue, Berman said.

With the exception of Cambridge Research, which is based in Massachusetts, the cut research projects were based at HP’s Palo Alto, California headquarters.