Hacker News Reader

Comment by outworlder | Hacker News Reader

> Also: she used to use pine(1) to read her emails. That increased her stature in my eyes, and those of quite a few other engineers.

Ok, now that is amazing. That speaks more about her culture and background than a hundred random actions.

View on HN

Oh wow! She used pine! Freakin' pine! She sent the company down the tubes, but... holy shit did she ever read her emails in a terminal!

Also: Way to dogfood Yahoo Mail. Shows how much faith you have in your own products - as CEO no less.

I mean, I get your point on pine, but I think the jury is still out on whether she was the cause for Yahoo's demise. I think the media definitely overhyped her, but Yahoo was in pretty dire straits when she took over in 2012

True, but, it seems that much like US presidents, CEOs want all the credit for good results and excuses for the bad ones.

It'd probably be a more accurate version of reality to accept that CEOs and Presidents have relatively little to do with either kind of results. That'd require that we give up the very human tendency to believe in Great People and force us to believe in Ordinary People involved with Great Things.

The buck stops in the C-suite. Verizon bought Yahoo for a tenth of what Microsoft offered eight short years ago. It's impossible to say this or that person was responsible for Yahoo's demise, but her job was to turn it around and in that she failed.

That's not entirely accurate.

Microsoft's offer included patents, Japan, and Alibaba. Today that is all worth more than $45B, so their current exit is technically better.

The dogfood argument is just such bullshit. Just because you make a product, doesn't mean you're the target audience for that product. It's great to dogfood where you can, but that should not get in the way of your productivity if it's not the right tool for the job (and is not meant to be).

I'm reminded of the April Fool's joke a couple years ago where the lead of the Subversion project announced they were switching to git. It was actually a really mature response, I was really disappointed it was just a joke.

Really. Is the bar so low on CEO performance that we credit them for removing turnstiles and changing the cafeteria menu?

FFS. Judging people based on their email client?

People usually judge others based on what they can see ("you are what you eat", but not only). Why not based on what tool they use? It contributes to establish a persona.

It's like looking into a stranger's face and seeing yourself. "omg she's one of us."

Steve Jobs famously used a Thinkpad after returning to Apple.

A Time interview from August 1997 confirms that:

http://allaboutstevejobs.com/sayings/stevejobsinterviews/tim...

In that specific case, Jobs had just come back from NeXT, and Mac OS hadn't yet incorporated elements from NeXTSTEP. It sounds as though Jobs used some early precursor version of Keynote, which may have been more easily ported onto a Thinkpad than onto a Powerbook at the time.

Also, in fairness, the circa 1997 Thinkpad was the best business machine on the market. Period. Macs had to catch up. The Macbook wasn't even a figment of anyone's imagination back then. The Powerbook 3400 (c. early 1997) was faster than the Thinkpad, but the productivity suite available at the time wasn't anything to write home about, let alone use for serious presentations.

All that is to say, I'm not as shocked on reading this as I guess I should be. From everything I've heard, Jobs only took dogfooding so far. If he didn't believe an internal product was the best for a given purpose, he didn't dogfood it. (I would be curious to know if he used Mail, for instance...)

This reminds me me that Rhapsody eventually had limited unofficial PowerBook support. I wonder if Steve Jobs ever used it.

Not uncommon in this industry, see choice of: browser, OS, smart phone, text editor/IDE, etc...

The only thing that should matter is which text editor she uses.

But did she use a tiling window manager?!

She did not use the text editor with its own email client(s), which is all we really needed to know.

But she did use an email client with it's own text editor.

Yes.

Mind you, I couldn't care less if she used Outlook over Apple Mail. Doesn't matter.

However, her use of _Pine_ indicates many things:

* Non-negligible tech expertise. She is comfortable with a terminal and confortable with an old (albeit powerful) email client WHICH DOES NOT DO HTML MAIL.

* Background: could be anything, but Pine usage is correlated with engineering and university backgrounds.

I could go on. The point is: she is no normal clueless CEO having secretaries printing out emails. And that's depressingly rare these days, even in SV.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com