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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?"
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.
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.
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.
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.