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collyw

FFS. Judging people based on their email client?

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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.

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

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.

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