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?"

May be the best decision he ever made.

Can't fault a guy for makin' money.

Re:

Hit and run; the consistent meme in corporate strategy.

May be the best decision he NEVER made.

Hit and run; the consistent meme in corporate strategy.

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.

Re:May be the best decision he NEVER made.

"RC1 isn't the shipping OS"

You sure about that?

Re:May be the best decision he NEVER made.

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:May be the best decision he NEVER made.

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.

Re:May be the best decision he NEVER made.

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:May be the best decision he ever made.

It's like "hit Microsoft and run and make a whole bunch of money in the process".

Sweet.

Re:May be the best decision he ever made.

It's implied right in the summary. Microsoft didn't want investors to lose confidence in Vista, so they shipped it early to coincide with Valentine's departure. That way it looks like Valentine left because the product was ready rather than leaving because the project was going down the drain.

Think of it this way: What does it say when a coach of a sports team decides to jump ship to another team mid-season?

Re:May be the best decision he ever made.

Vista was delayed so long anyway, would another dozen years really make a difference? I should think an OS that's not ready is worse for investor confidence than delays people are already used to.

Re:May be the best decision he ever made.

I think they were originally planning a simultaneous release of Vista and Duke Nukem Forever.

This incident has everything:

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 [infoworld.com]. 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."

Re:May be the best decision he ever made.

Ahhh thank you, I failed to remember the inherit sheep like behavior of investors. :)

I think you meant inherent. You know, as in "Correcting errors of slashdot posters is an inherent behavior of a grammar nazi."

Re:May be the best decision he ever made.

Hmmmm. Maybe he thinks investors are a sub-class, derived from sheep? You know, kind of:

class Investor: public Sheep {.......

sort of thing?

Re:May be the best decision he ever made.

That's just silly.

Investors implement the ISheep interface, but they clearly extend the doucheBag class.

Maybe the best decision he made... maybe...

And yes, yes you can fault people for making money.

Re:Maybe the best decision he made... maybe...

you can fault people for making money.

Yep, its called counterfeiting.

Re:Maybe the best decision he made... maybe...

And yes, yes you can fault people for making money.

Well, you can fault people for what they do to make money. But just making money?

Re:Who said Vista was rushed?

Not broken development. Broken management. There is a difference. Vista is the result of the latter.

New improved "Lies, damn lies, and..."

Although analysts fell for the PR line

There are lies, damn lies, and material misstatements to the investment community.

So...

How long until Amazon OS is released?

Re:So...

Five years.

What is so uniquely brilliant about this guy...

To make him worth that kind of money?

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

He had the foresight to make himself am essential part of company A at exactly the time that company B wanted to begin competing with A.

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

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.

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

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

Beer ....

"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!

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

I work in Brian's org at Amazon (and am posting as AC for obvious reasons) -- man, what a loss this was for you guys at Microsoft! Unlike most senior execs I've encountered, he's not afraid to challenge the status quo; on the other hand, he isn't obsessed with changing things for the sake of change (if it works well enough, leave it be). Not afraid to call bullshit when he sees it.

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.

Stop it!

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

Amazon made the big mistake 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.

Re:Amazon made the big mistake here...

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.

Wait just a minute ...

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?

I'll crank out a dodgy RC1 for tomorrow if you've got a couple of million for me too. :-P

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. :-P

Cheers

Bad title

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.

Not the only factor

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).

Re:Not the only factor

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.

Cheaper at Amazon!

"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!

Not So Premature

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.

It was an accident

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.

How quickly we forget

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.

Nobody can ship Windows twice, Valentine was done.

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.

Re:

What competition? OS X? Linux?

The only real competition Vista has is XP.

You miss the point

People have very short memories. They see the fanfare and forget the 5 year death march.

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.

Re:You miss the point

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.

Too fucking right! For a project as huge as Vista, I find it ludicrous that command, review, and oversight are all embodied by one individual. They're just taking his word for it?! This is one of those things I logically refuse to believe but have also come to expect in the business world.

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.

Gross mis-management

Yes, you would expect a bit more oversight on such a critical project with such a huge budget.

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:Who Cares?!!

We leave linux bashing to Forbes, The Yankee Group, Mr Enderle etc. They are much better at it. :)

Well ... duh!

Its sad how this site has gone down the tubes.

How else would it get to our computers?

Re:WinFS

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:WinFS

WinFS is not and never will be a file system.

In fact, I doubt it will ever be a real product.

It's vaporware that's resurrected every once and then (ever since the early NT vs. IBM's OS/2 times), designed to make Microsoft look like it has some flashy technology pointy-haired-bosses will not be able to tell it's a Really Bad Idea. And they won't because it will never, ever ship.

WinFS is not real.

Re:150K is not that much

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.

Re:This is someone's lie

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.