Bozoma Saint John Was Badass Long Before Apple

wired.com

7 points·dwynings··3 comments

I love this, and I say this as someone whose musical tastes aren't served by Apple + and who thinks wired's articles are mostly pretty dumb.

I went and looked at the WWDC stream and indeed she's a breath of fresh air in a team that otherwise looks pretty bland (including a bland view of music). They're actually nerds, so not really bland, but she makes me think that apple is open to all sorts of interesting shake-ups...let's hope there are all sorts, both technical and not.

I don't think putting "marketing" people into "developer" conferences is all that ground breaking or disruptive.

Fair, I actually find it weird that dev conferences have become press events for enthusiasts (so that now there's a real dev event after the press one), so my comment seems strange.

I really meant two things: mainly that here was someone who didn't look like everyone else at apple. Secondarily I think it's good to have less of a sharp dividing line between marketing and development, so that marketing at least has a chance of understanding what's being built and the dev have some idea about what marketing thinks. Many companies do pull that off internally these days (for a long time it wasn't really so) but if you're going to have a word press event, why not make it quite as dry? Frankly the other guys couldn't convincingly get excited about large emoticons. Nor could I.

In the same spirit: I really never liked Ballmer at all (or the Windows programming model) except when he came on stage, danced, and screamed "developers developers developers." He was right and what a relief it was to see someone in senior management so enthusiastic -- I believed it. He did a lot of stupid and evil things, but for that I loved him.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com