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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?"
To make him worth that kind of money?
What competition? OS X? Linux?
The only real competition Vista has is XP.
Gone!
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Follow this link if the page is not redirected. So they need to check whether I have Office installed just so I can see the MS Project page? Interesting... (Win XP Pro + Firefox + NoScript, with JavaScript turned off for microsoft.com, produced the above page.)
How to I get down on the action to rush out a release candidate and then leave for a large bonus and some stock options which will make me a millionaire?
:-P
:-P
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
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
As I recall, a lot of companies who'd forked over lots of dollars for multi-year support agreements back around 2001 (there was some marketing phrase, I forget what) were starting to grumble that the promised new releases included in the price hadn't yet been released, and the agreements were about to expire.
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).
-- Alastair
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.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Well, you can fault people for what they do to make money. But just making money?
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
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".
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I think the point is that Valentine decided to leave, and MS knew that would look bad to investors. So MS pushed Vista out the door to give investors the impression that Valentine was leaving because there was nothing more to do on Vista.
Brian Valentine was known throughout the company as a guy who could take troubled products that were floundering and he could get them shipped. But leadership in Windows is cursed to two releases.
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.
Not broken development. Broken management. There is a difference. Vista is the result of the latter.
The thing is that he didn't release Vista, just RC1. RC1 isn't the shipping OS. Sounds like someone still at Microsoft is trying to point the blame at someone who left a year before. This isn't Hit and Run, it's Duck and Cover.
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.
The enemies of Democracy are
Well if I was about to be tied to a stinker like Vista, which would stink on ice. (or as George Carlin once said '... could knock a buzzard off a sh#twagon') I would want to salvage some sort of appearance of success as I bailed out of the company and on to millions. As long as the contract is signed at the new job then I don't care how wet the ink is when it all goes to hell. Vista was going to go down so hard it was going to taint everybody who even lived nearby let alone Microsoft. I can't fault the guy for knowing when its about to hit the fan.
Personally I think I will stay out of Management thank you very much.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
A few years ago, I became a Microsoft employee by way of acquisition (I don't work there anymore). Your second theory is correct: this event speaks volumes about the way MS functions and how their corporate culture contributes to their products. I'm sure the story is no lie, but I don't think it's the case that he left and everyone just went nuts and shoved Vista out the door ready or not. Vista was way behind schedule and had lost highly touted features such as WinFS along the way. My opinion of the whole situation is that decision makers had come to the conclusion that "We're way past when we planned to ship, way over budget, have shed major promised features of Longhorn, and people are starting to use Vista and Duke Nuke'em Forever in the same sentence. We've got to get something out the door."
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.