Slashdot Log In
Did Amazon Induce Vista's Premature Birth?
Posted by
kdawson
on Thu Feb 21, 2008 03:58 PM
from the ready-or-not-here-i-come dept.
from the ready-or-not-here-i-come dept.
theodp writes "A recent Amazon SEC filing sheds light on the puzzling departure of Microsoft Sr. VP Brian Valentine in Sept. 2006. Valentine is the Gen. George Patton-like figure charged with pushing Vista developers, who dumped the still not-ready-for-prime-time OS into RC1 status as he bolted for a new gig at Amazon. Having repeatedly assured everyone that Valentine was staying with the company post-Vista, Microsoft backpedaled and explained that Valentine decided to leave since the company had shipped a near-final version of Vista. Not so. Although analysts fell for the PR line, it seems Valentine had actually signed an Employment Agreement way back in June calling for him to be on board at Amazon on Sept. 11 if he wanted to pick up a $1.7M signing bonus, $150K base salary, another $500K bonus, and 400K shares of Amazon stock (now worth almost $30M). Who says you have to shell out $999.95 for MS-Project to come up with accurate planned completion dates?"
Related Stories
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
May be the best decision he ever made. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
May be the best decision he NEVER made. (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:May be the best decision he NEVER made. (Score:5, Funny)
You sure about that?
Parent
Re:May be the best decision he NEVER made. (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:May be the best decision he NEVER made. (Score:5, Interesting)
No, this doesn't shift blame from Microsoft at all. That's why they didn't want this to be known.
Release Candidates are supposed to be versions you *think* are worthy to ship, but need to undergo thorough testing to make sure. Any changes that need to be made should be minor.
If he upgraded the project to RC1 status, and the testing showed that it wasn't anywhere near ready for release, then Microsoft could have downgraded it in a jiffy and said more work needed to be done. Or kept it at "RC1" for a long time before making "RC2" which would be the first real Release Candidate.
Instead they ended up pushing it out the door in short order (maybe not RC1 specifically, but only a minor change from it), so as to make it look like the project was indeed almost ready for release and that's why the project leader left. As opposed to this version of events, which looks more like the project wasn't going good and the project leader got a better offer so he jumped ship and left the project to hang.
It doesn't make MS look good at all.
Parent
Re:May be the best decision he NEVER made. (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:May be the best decision he ever made. (Score:4, Funny)
Sweet.
Parent
Re:May be the best decision he ever made. (Score:5, Insightful)
Think of it this way: What does it say when a coach of a sports team decides to jump ship to another team mid-season?
Parent
Re:May be the best decision he ever made. (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:May be the best decision he ever made. (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
This incident has everything: (Score:5, Funny)
This incident has everything: 1) Overpaying executives and underpaying the people who do the work. He got stock options worth $30 million just for coming to work the first day? 2) Corporate lies and sneakiness and manipulation. 3) Absolutely no caring for customers. 4) Behavior that will eventually sink the company. Remember, at one time IBM had 100% of the PC business. Remember, IBM lost $1 billion on OS2, and then lost another $1 billion. Even the biggest company cannot treat customers badly forever.
The whole Vista experience oozes sleaziness. It's the true modern horror story. In comparison, the movie "Aliens" is for schoolchildren. What's a monster compared to Bill Gates in the role as software's "Dr. Death", degrading the quality of life of millions of people by hassling them and costing them more?
One of the biggest and most respected IT magazines is rejecting Windows Vista: Save Windows XP [infoworld.com]. Quote: "More than 75,000 people have signed InfoWorld's "Save XP" petition in the three weeks since it was launched - many with passionate, often emotional pleas to not be forced to make a change."
Parent
Re:May be the best decision he ever made. (Score:5, Funny)
I think you meant inherent. You know, as in "Correcting errors of slashdot posters is an inherent behavior of a grammar nazi."
Parent
Re:May be the best decision he ever made. (Score:4, Funny)
class Investor: public Sheep {.......
sort of thing?
Parent
Re:May be the best decision he ever made. (Score:4, Funny)
Investors implement the ISheep interface, but they clearly extend the doucheBag class.
Parent
Maybe the best decision he made... maybe... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Maybe the best decision he made... maybe... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Maybe the best decision he made... maybe... (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, you can fault people for what they do to make money. But just making money?
Parent
Re:Who said Vista was rushed? (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
New improved "Lies, damn lies, and..." (Score:5, Funny)
There are lies, damn lies, and material misstatements to the investment community.
So... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:So... (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
What is so uniquely brilliant about this guy... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What is so uniquely brilliant about this guy... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:What is so uniquely brilliant about this guy... (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:What is so uniquely brilliant about this guy... (Score:5, Interesting)
He also has a very engaging style of management. Instead of leading from afar he would hold weekly team meetings where he would give everybody the projects status, address concerns, and then kick off the festivities with clips from the weekly world news. The comedy skits he and Ian MacDonald would do were pretty funny most of the time.
He projects the work hard play hard mentality. He always kept the team meetings stocked with several kegs of beer and always told the employees that if they drank too much take a cab home and expense it.
I would say he was my favorite higher level manager at Microsoft.
----- Rom
Parent
Beer .... (Score:4, Funny)
That explains VISTA!
Parent
Re:What is so uniquely brilliant about this guy... (Score:5, Interesting)
He also runs one of the flattest orgs I've ever been in -- the depth of the tree from intern to Brian is quite shallow. Bringing a problem to his attention is subsequently easy, but you'd better be prepared to defend why it's a problem, why it's solvable, and why you think it's that important.
My friends over at MS say that he really got the shaft over Vista. Sounds about right for the culture -- my read is that failure is penalized heavily there these days. The strategy for succeeding in an environment like that? Office Space.
Parent
Stop it! (Score:5, Funny)
Amazon made the big mistake here... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Amazon made the big mistake here... (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Wait just a minute ... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'll crank out a dodgy RC1 for tomorrow if you've got a couple of million for me too.
That sounds like a pretty sweet deal.
However, somehow I'm finding myself not actually surprised to know that Vista got prematurely elevated by someone who no longer gave a shit. That has the ring of truthiness about it.
Cheers
Bad title (Score:5, Insightful)
Not the only factor (Score:5, Interesting)
This is one of the factors that prompted the early release of the "business" version of Vista in late 2006 instead of it being released along with the home version in early 2007.
Not that any businesses really wanted to touch that, but it let Microsoft say they'd lived up to their part of the agreement (in their own inimitable (innovative?) Microsoft way, of course).
Re:Not the only factor (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Cheaper at Amazon! (Score:5, Funny)
Hey, it's only $854.99 at Amazon!
Not So Premature (Score:4, Funny)
Vista wasn't really a "premature birth". It's more like putting every other ingredient into a recipe, then trying to fix it by baking it for too long.
It was an accident (Score:4, Funny)
How quickly we forget (Score:5, Insightful)
There was tremendous pressure from all sides to release Vista. Don't think you can really place the blame on Valentine or Amazon for this one.
Nobody can ship Windows twice, Valentine was done. (Score:5, Interesting)
Moshe Dunie pushed out two major versions of NT and floundered with NT5 (Windows 2000) and couldn't integrate 9x. Valentine came in, got the organization in order, and Windows 2000 was a success. He kept it up to merge the organization and features from Win9x, and miraculously got XP out in less than two years with nearly all the good planned features. Then, Longhorn became his NT5. Everybody in the organization had massive planned super-features that weren't fully baked in the ideas phase. The org got sidetracked by Springboard and Trainyard rollouts for XP. They had a massive brain drain getting rid of FTEs below level 88 and told long term contractors to take a hike. The employees that were left had their institutional knowledge too diluted and strung out trying to teach new H1B and college hires while managing Chinese and Indian outsource firms doing half the work.
So what do you get? Vista. Valentine is no dummie. He pushed aside other execs that were wallowing in development hell projects. Now he was the one in development hell. He arranged his own exit on his terms. Good for him.
Sinofsky will get a Vista replacement out by 2009 and it'll be a clean-up release that makes a lot of people happy. Lots of stuff cut from Vista will get back in, done right. He'll get a big feature release out by 2011. After that you won't see another major Windows release until 2015.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The only real competition Vista has is XP.
You miss the point (Score:5, Insightful)
I've seen this effect before. A manager in a company I worked for was angling for a position in a different business unit in the company. He wanted to show focus, leadership etc so he whitewashed the problems in the project he was directing and pushed for a premature release. He forced design choices that looked OK in the short term (from outside) and ignored the longterm consequences. He got the new job and a big write-up about how he had managed this project so well. Of course the project was flawed, but he did not have to clean up the mess anfd the product got canned a few months later.
Release decisions etc should not be made by exiting managers. They shopuld be made by the new management team that has to keep things going.
Parent
Re:You miss the point (Score:4, Interesting)
If I knew a manager under me was looking to leave the company, I'd make sure his replacement was being trained and put in place long before the departure. How the hell can you expect any continuity in the process with people popping in and out? You can't run a fast food joint like that, let alone a major multi-billion dollar corporation.
I also would like to know what this guy does that's worth that kind of money. You'd almost thing it would have to be sexual.
Parent
Gross mis-management (Score:4, Interesting)
Even if the manager does not jump ship, he might get killed in a plane crash etc.
The cool thing for a ship-jumping manager is that he gets away clean. Even if he leaves a mess behind he can always twist it: "Now that I've left, everything has fallen apart. Look at how good I am! Hand me another million share options".
Parent
Re:Who Cares?!! (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Well ... duh! (Score:5, Funny)
How else would it get to our computers?
Parent
Re:WinFS (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:WinFS (Score:4, Insightful)
In fact, I doubt it will ever be a real product.
It's vaporware that's resurrected every once and then (ever since the early NT vs. IBM's OS/2 times), designed to make Microsoft look like it has some flashy technology pointy-haired-bosses will not be able to tell it's a Really Bad Idea. And they won't because it will never, ever ship.
WinFS is not real.
Parent
Re:150K is not that much (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:This is someone's lie (Score:5, Interesting)
And that's about what happened. They got something out the door. IMO they got it out the door a little too soon, but there weren't going to be any more features added, it had been in beta a long time, and the holiday season was coming up. The calendar told them they had to release in time for that.
After all that, it was a bit of a flop anyway. Sales were (and are) quite non-stellar. This goes back to (mostly) the lack of compelling features (these were the ones shed just to be able to ship something), combined with the confusing license soup. The lowest-end versions of Vista, in particular, offer nothing compelling over XP. In fact, a user of XP Pro - or probably even XP Home - would find things that were missing from Vista Home Basic and have to go out and spend to get that functionality again.
And now we see Microsoft making something of a public embarrassment of itself on the world stage, fighting its battle with Yahoo in the press. If you're considering a proxy fight to initiate a hostile takeover, you don't talk about it in the newspapers. You communicate that privately to the Yahoo board, and if they again tell you where to shove it, you just taking action. You don't slug it out in the newspapers like a Brittany Spears saga.
If there was any serious doubt that Microsoft has jumped the shark, I think Vista dispelled it handily.
That doesn't mean Microsoft is not still a formidable player. They've got tons of money, some profitable product lines, and plenty of smart people working there. MSFT isn't going to disappear, and it's not going to go down without a fight. However, don't be surprised if it goes through some pretty radical re-orgs in the 3-7 year time frame. Particularly if MSFT gets what it's wishing for and buys Yahoo, there will be incredible challenges on The Road Ahead.
Parent