Valleywag
In 2001, Brian Valentine, then a top Microsoft executive, was pumped about Windows XP, as a spoof infomercial shows. By the time Vista was getting ready for release, his enthusiasm had waned. The reason? Some believe he was pining for Gianna Puerini, a sales manager who had left Microsoft for Amazon.com in 2003. In July 2006, Valentine secretly signed an employment contract with Amazon.com. Microsoft did not reveal that he was leaving for Amazon.com until September 5, less than a week before he started his new job. The business rationale for hiding his departure was obvious: Valentine ran the team that was shipping its Windows Vista operating system. Losing their leader would have killed morale.
In retrospect, it's obvious that Valentine's lack of motivation was reflected in the final product. Even Bill Gates has conceded Vista's failure now, and there's talk that Microsoft will replace it with an early release of Windows Seven, Vista's successor. It's hard to imagine Valentine, or anyone, making a video about Vista that's anything like the Windows XP promotion below:
So who is this woman for whom Valentine dumped Microsoft? A filing with the SEC reveals that Puerini was the "housemate" of Valentine mentioned, but not named, in a similar filing last year. Puerini, Amazon's director of user retail experience, just got a $1 million stock grant, an amount the company says is similar to the compensation earned by other employees at her level. So lets grant that she's smart. Her Facebook profile photo, reproduced above, suggests she's good-looking as well. A catch for Valentine, and apparently worth leaving Microsoft in the middle of completing its most important product.
Has the couple shipped their own product? Puerini has a baby registry for an arrival dated last September. The pair also have a wedding registry on the site — but it's labeled as a test. On it, Puerini writes: "ABOUT THE COUPLE: This is a test registry. I am not getting married. I have no plans to get married. I repeat - this is a test! :-)" The baby registry may therefore also be a test.
One thing Valentine and Puerini have definitely done as a couple: donate an amount between $25,000 and $250,000 to Washington State University (PDF).
Comments
One thing I especially loathe about high tech is the cult of individualism. Specifically, the attribution of divine qualities to some management goof. There were probably a thousand people working on Vista, and because one guy moved on to other things, it's crap? It's a wonder that Apollo 11 landed on the moon without LBJ in charge.
As someone who was on the Vista team in COSD (Core Operating Systems Division), I can tell you with some authority that nobody gave a damn about who Brian Valentine was pining for. He was always funny in the WIM meetings and cared about people, but ultimately left because Vista was late, over budget, and Microsoft wasn't fun anymore.
Losing Brian Valentine killed nobody's morale and those of us who worked on Vista are all proud of the work we did and the product we shipped. If building and releasing an operating system is so damn easy, why don't you make one?
For starters, I wouldn't let the MPAA dictate a f**ing line of code to me.
@swifter, apple does it more regularly and with 1/10th the problems MSFT OS does. Besides who cares that much any more about the OS. It's all about the browser baby.
I won't say that developing an OS is easy, but the market ultimately decides the fate of any product, and the market has said that Vista sucks. Period. My next desktop machine will be a Mac, and I can't believe I've actually reached that point.
@Adam Rock: Dude, Microsoft is like an arms merchant. They don't care whether you use DRM or not. They make it available to content producers so those producers will release content on the Windows platform, which benefits Microsoft.
Microsoft doesn't force you to buy or use DRM content. If you don't want content with DRM, don't buy any. I certainly don't. Sooner or later the content producers will realize that they can sell a lot more without it.
You might as well be pissed off at the Colt Arms company for the war in Iraq. It's just stupid. Grow up.
@michaellamb: @sinical: Apple supports a hardware platform it totally controls, unlike Microsoft which must support exponentially greater combinations from thousands of different vendors.
Microsoft has sold more copies of Vista than all versions of OS X combined and did so about the second month of release. And, the largest and most successful software vendor for the OS X platform is, guess who, Microsoft.
Just sayin'.
If Vista was the product of yet another man thinking and acting with the wrong head, it'd all make perfect sense.
@Swifter: Fair enough. I won't blame you. I hope you've read [www.cs.auckland.ac.nz] .
I sure feel sorry for the video driver authors for having to follow such convoluted instruction sets.
Cougars suck.
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