Did Amazon Induce Vista's Premature Birth?

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?"

Re:The reason?

[Sciros]

What competition? XP?

(Maybe that's a reason it took as long as it did to ship as well.) Besides, like you imply, there indeed was pressure to "release it already" since it had been in development so long. Possibly enough pressure that even a killer offer from Amazon didn't really speed things along much more, if at all.

Re:WinFS

[EXMSFT]

Where do I begin? WinFS was never a filesystem in it's own right. It was a glommed-on database where an integrated SQL Server instance stored one table, and then NTFS stored another - and the data was never very well linked together. Frankly I was disappointed in the WinFS implementation from the very first time someone actually described how it worked. Vista is touch-and-go enough for most consumers without having WinFS - the usability problems WinFS would have brought would not have been worth it as it was. It was cut because it was not ready for prime-time - just as several cool features were in XP, and Windows 2000 before it.

Re:Not the only factor

[EXMSFT]

The versions licensed via Software Assurance were all available in Q4CY06 - because they are delivered electronically. There is no magic juju that happened in the first three months of 2007 that made Home any different - it was the exact same codebase - only it had been localized, had shiny media made, and been put into retail boxes.

Re:What is so uniquely brilliant about this guy...

[flanksteak]

Valentine is the guy who led Exchange in the 90s as it took over corporate mail servers and then led the Windows releases of 2K (still my favorite), XP, and apparently Vista. Love or hate the products, he's been in charge of groups who have shipped some big stuff.

Who said Vista was rushed?

[gnutoo]

Vista was in development for five years or so and it's still broken a year later. No one can be faulted for a month or two in that time frame. The problem was more in the process itself and all sorts of other executive characters have left the Soft over it. Non free software development, especially Microsoft style development, is broken.

Re:May be the best decision he NEVER made.

[Afecks]

In a release candidate, everything is supposed to be locked down. There should not be any code changes only minor corrections such as typographical errors. If you are in RC1 and still adding or rewriting code then you've screwed the pooch.

Re:Not the only factor

[jabuzz]

Indeed, the SA agreements that where all coming up for renewal, stated that there would be at least *one* major release of the OS. Failure to ship an OS in the time frame of the SA agreements would have left Microsoft open to major law suites for breach of contract.

Re:May be the best decision he NEVER made.

[Herby Sagues]

From RC1 to RTM only two months passed, not one year. And the product RTMd about two weeks after he left. Based on previosu products, RC1 should have been very close to production ready, relatively stable, useable and fast (it was the case with Windows 2000 and XP, at least). With Vista, RC1 apparently barely compiled. It was completely unuseable. RC2 was much better, but still very difficult to use. RTM was what I would have expected for an RC2. I think the article is right, BV pushed Vista to a) be free to move earlier and b) not have another delay in his resumee.

Re:This incident has everything:

[dalguard]

Basically he's saying that Kleenex had 100% of the Kleenex market. "PC" was a brand name when IBM invented it, thus all PCs were IBMs. IBM didn't have 100% of the microcomputer market, but they had durn near close to 100% of the corporate microcomputer market. However (being even more pedantic), it's important to note that IBM lost that market intentionally. Unlike MS, when they got dinged for being anti-competitive they actually did something about it.