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".
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.
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....
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.
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!
There are a bunch of interesting papers that have been written on these topics. Cornell has been having a series of symposia and lectures over the last three years about the social science of online networks and communities. Some of the speakers/papers have been really good.
Most of the papers aren't linked to, but you can at least find the speakers and then Google their home page or look for the papers directly on JSTOR or whatever.
Not necessarily true. To really get a fundamental understanding of a phenomenon, you do not have the time to build it and often you don't have the inclination. Nothing wrong with that. It's up to others to take that research, distill it and build solutions.
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.
"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?
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.
