Did Amazon Induce Vista's Premature Birth? 296
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?"
What is so uniquely brilliant about this guy... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The reason? (Score:3, Interesting)
The only real competition Vista has is XP.
Project link... (Score:3, Interesting)
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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
WinFS (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Maybe the best decision he made... maybe... (Score:2, Interesting)
(anonymous because I work for one of mentioned companies)
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: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.
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?
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".
Re:The reason? (Score:3, Interesting)
Sorry but I'm quite satisfied with XP. It's solid as a rock and I haven't seen a crash in years.
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
Re:Like a bad ripoff on AS-400s. (Score:2, Interesting)
what does Oracle use for storage? that depends. when running RAC (Real Application Clusters), we cheaped it out and used OCFS (Oracle Clustered File System), which was pretty close to just using raw devices and writing to them. typically a database doesn't need much more than a wrapper around storage, everything is stored in a proprietary/binary way anyways. a file system is just overhead or the middleman at that point.
Re:Amazon made the big mistake here... (Score:5, Interesting)
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:How quickly we forget (Score:3, Interesting)
Having worked in the software industry, I know sometimes you have to bite the bullet, ship the product and deal with the fallout. Would it have been better to wait? Maybe. Would the product have been better after another year of development? Maybe not, it's been over a year and they can't get the 1st service pack out.
It's probably a testament to the tenacity of Microsoft that Vista was ever released at all. Vista could have been the end of Microsoft as a company. Now the product is out and they have, at least at some level, made money on it. Now all they have to do is put some lipstick on the pig - something they have been very good at over the years.
Re:May be the best decision he ever made. (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Not So Premature (Score:2, Interesting)
There were a bunch of features that were planned and hyped, but then cut, like WinFS. Or how about a team spending a year designing the shutdown menu [blogspot.com]?
Re:Who said Vista was rushed? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
This is someone's lie (Score:3, Interesting)
Tell you what - HIS boss, whoever that is, as well as all the direct reports to that now gone suit should be fired w/o hesitation. Whether you like MS or hate them, this is textbook how not to develop and release a product so either someone's lying or, if this is really how MS functions then it speaks volumes for what's profoundly wrong with MS and why all their major releases are screwed up a little bit.
prep for the new job (Score:3, Interesting)
Personally I think I will stay out of Management thank you very much.
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.
Re:100% of the PC-compatible business computer mar (Score:2, Interesting)
I have a TRS-80 Model 4-P that shows otherwise.
When the TRS line started, it was almost exclusivly for small business and business education. I bought mine used and the guy who sold it to me had nearly everything that was made for it. There wasnt much science or entertainment stuff, but if you needed to do payroll, accounting, inventory, use a database, write a program in any popular language of the day etc.etc, I had (the media is probably corrupt after all this time) the retail software package to do it.
I think the guy said it cost him 3500 bucks new for the hardware. About 1/2- 1/3 the price of a new car. If you wanted a gaming computer, you bought the much cheaper CoCo. The models 1-4, pocket computer and the others were VERY business minded.
I wonder if that old beast will still boot... eh too lazy to dig it out.