

Microsoft Makes Key Hire in Researcher Danah Boyd - qhoxie
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/microsoft_makes_key_hire_in_researcher_danah_boyd.php

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michael_dorfman
No offense to Ms. boyd, but when I think of some of the people who are or have
been associated with Microsoft Research (Erik Meijer, Simon Peyton-Jones, Jim
Gray, Pat Helland, Charles Simonyi, C.A.R. Hoare, Jim Blinn, Butler Lampson,
etc.) I have a hard time thinking of this as a _"key hire"_.

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fiaz
Keep in mind that when those people were hired, there was a lot of maturing
that needed to be done in the computer space. These people are titans by
today's standards because the timing of their arrival on the scene had much to
do with the amount of influence that they had. If you were to take ANY of
Charles Simonyi's recognizable mainstream achievements (most notably Word and
Excel) from the 80s and transported them to a startup today, they would hardly
amount to a drop in a bucket (of course this is subjective, but I think you
get the point!).

Today technology is commonplace and more widely distributed. I would place
danah boyd in the same category as those you have mentioned because of the
fact that the computer/tech/internet worlds are so much larger than it was in
the 80s. She is a leading intellectual when it comes to social networking and
I hope she has some influence at Microsoft in a positive direction. Because of
her large amount of knowledge in the technology space as it applies to its
social impact, this is indeed a key hire for Microsoft as they struggle to
make heads or tails of how companies like Google and Facebook have had such a
huge following.

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timr
Yeah, the big difference is that she doesn't _make_ anything. All of those
other people write software. Ms. Boyd produces treatises on social networks.

I'm not saying that she doesn't have value, but calling her a "key hire" at
Microsoft is a pretty big stretch. "PR coup" is a lot closer to the truth....

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fiaz
We are entering a different era of computing where being a company as large as
Microsoft needs much more than engineers. There is a social aspect to
computing in large part due to the internet. To dismiss danah boyd as a
cheerleader for Microsoft would totally miss the point of what she actually
has to offer in terms of intellectual abilities to Microsoft.

Please remember that Microsoft has been flailing from the beginning when it
came to accepting the internet. They need all of the intelligence they can get
in order to be ahead of the curve in relation to social impact.

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volida
Sorry, but if she has so much deep understanding of social networks why isn't
she creating her own social network?

Writting as a skill focused on one subject is nowhere near the understanding
of the process of executing and causing evolution/creating something new.

In my eyes it's just a PR move.

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fiaz
_Sorry, but if she has so much deep understanding of social networks why isn't
she creating her own social network?_

Because her interest is in the academic studies of social networking and how
the current and future generations use them (something that is lacking in
academia and needs more attention). If her interest were in creating a
business around a web application that has a central theme of social
networking then I think your question would be more applicable to danah.

You could ask the same question of Duncan Watts as well, but again, he is an
academic who now works for Yahoo!

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volida
The best way to understanding something is by creating it.

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mechanical_fish
The world needs _both_ creators and analysts. Both kinds of people suffer from
a problem of limited perspective: The analyst spends so much time above the
problem that she may miss the aspects that are only visible from the inside...
but the creator is _stuck inside_ and doesn't really have the chance to look
at her creation dispassionately from a distance.

Also, there's no guarantee that the designer of a thing has any understanding
of it at all. That's pretty much the essence of the theory of evolution. I
wouldn't argue that the design of social networks is a _totally_ mindless
process of variation followed by selection, but it certainly does involve a
lot of trial and error. I'm not sure that the designers of, say, Craigslist
have much better understanding of why it works than anyone else does. They
just happen to have made some initial choices that worked, and when they made
changes they used feedback to guide them toward what their users liked. That's
a _rational_ process, but it doesn't necessarily reflect _understanding_.

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volida
Trial and error involve a heavy amount of analysis. And as far as I know this
is what happens in successful startups.

So, I can't see how any creator doesn't have the analytic-side in him/her.

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comatose_kid
"If Microsoft is going to be relevant to the next generation of computer
users, who better to pay attention to than the leading expert on how the next
generation is using social networks?"

Yeah, just like hiring a leading expert in social networks helped Apple become
relevant? Oh no, that's right, they did it by designing better products and
software. Why not figure out how to do that again instead?

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neilc
_they did it by designing better products and software. Why not figure out how
to do that again instead?_

Right, because a company of Microsoft's size is capable of only doing one or
the other. The purpose of MSR is not to directly ship software.

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comatose_kid
We'll just have to disagree on that one, since I think MS isn't doing well at
either right now. I think more focus on their core would help them a lot more
than following others in trendier areas.

Edit: I missed the part where you said MSR isn't about shipping s/w. You are
right. I just disagree with the conclusions of the original article.

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quasimojo
yeah and she can do for msft what she did for yhoo: BLAH BLAH BLAH

