Slashdot Mirror
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?"
Can't fault a guy for makin' money.
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
There are lies, damn lies, and material misstatements to the investment community.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
How long until Amazon OS is released?
To make him worth that kind of money?
What competition? OS X? Linux?
The only real competition Vista has is XP.
Gone!
He didn`t do it for the money - he wanted the users to have a modern, lightweight operating system with great features like Aq...Aero, media controlled internet bandwith, and gazillions of bl...features. The system is very mature and st
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.
I like basketball!!1!
And yes, yes you can fault people for making money.
[insert witty comment here]
If he is willing to push an unfinished product to market at a huge loss to his company just so that he can leave his current post for a higher paying one, what is to say he won't simply rinse and repeat. People like this are more a liability than an asset.
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.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
To help optimize how your Web pages are displayed, we are checking to see if a 2007 Microsoft Office program is installed.
If this page does not automatically redirect, you have scripts disabled. See more information on scripts.
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.)
We leave linux bashing to Forbes, The Yankee Group, Mr Enderle etc. They are much better at it. :)
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.
Why did they have to rip out WinFS ..and why did they rip it out before he left .. it's not in RC1 even?
If one person leaving company X for company Y and it causes causes company X's bread and butter product to suck, it's not company Y's fault. Company X should have invested in business continuity. BCP is boring, but what if instead of being hired away, he was hit by a bus or (arguably similar to the deal he got at Amazon) wins the lottery? A company 1/10th the size of Microsoft shouldn't have all its eggs in one basket.
Take off every 'sig' for great justice.
Its sad how this site has gone down the tubes.
How else would it get to our computers?
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
Man, if I'm Microsoft and I'm generally willing to break the law to get my way when push comes to shove, I'm probably sending some guys to bust Valentine's kneecaps at a minimum.
Granted, that wouldn't help them out in the short term, but they'd lose less executives if a savage beating was part of the severance package. Hell, they probably could advertise right here on slashdot for people willing to kick a Microsoft executive in the groin for free!
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.
"Who says you have to shell out $999.95 for MS-Project to come up with accurate planned completion dates?"
Hey, it's only $854.99 at Amazon!
A signature always reveals a man's character - and sometimes even his name. -- Evan Esar
"To make him worth that kind of money?"
It's what he convinced someone to pay him.
What you were expecting someone to give you something objective so you could rant about no one being worth that much? Sorry, but my metric is the one that matters, and it says he's worth what he got.
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.
Not a typewriter
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.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
Amazon was just playing catch with a baseball and the ball got away. It hit Microsoft right in the womb. Shortly after Vista said "Calculating File Transfer". Microsoft and doctors thought that Vista might be in trouble so they induced the labor. Then after it was born they found out it was just a "feature". That original file transfer is still "calculating" to this day.
For top notch positions, the yearly salary is just cosmetic. Its not uncommon for high ranked managers and architects to make some silly salary like minimum wadge, but get hundreds over hundreds of thousands in bonus every year. Its a whole different ballbark from the average salaried developer monkey.
What the article doesn't seem to mention, or remember, is all the bad press Microsoft was getting for having the DNF of Operating Systems. They were getting annual vaporware nominations, and basically looking like a bunch of idiots that couldn't get a product out the door.
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.
Find coupons in Greeley
Yep, that is why you see Vista people moving to Linux in droves. In actuality, people usually "upgrade" to XP. I put that in quotes, because people on Slashdot like to say that all the time.
Sorry but I'm quite satisfied with XP. It's solid as a rock and I haven't seen a crash in years.
Gone!
What does the DB2 engine use for storage.
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.
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.
More if the programmers qualified under Amazon's "Get 4 for the price of 3" promotion.
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
"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."
That explains VISTA!
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
The big secret is that Vista and Duke Nukem Forever are actually the same program. The trouble is, people keep trying to get Vista to act like an OS.
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. 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."
It stays on 24/7 thank you and has been installed for over 3 years.
If XP crashes, something is wrong and it's not the OS.
Gone!
There is no executive no matter how talented who's absence would create a problem this large. The senior suit leaves and all of a sudden the minions of program managers and bit heads running the company's #1 product release all go insane on the same day?
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.
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
I thought Valentine left on 14 February?
"Tandy and Commodore were not used in businesses, usually."
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.
"Doctor, it's not the voices I hear in MY head, but the voices I hear in YOUR head that really frighten me."