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.
