Brian Valentine

Henry Brian Valentine (born November 28, 1959 in Centralia, Washington) is the Senior Vice President, Ecommerce Platform at Amazon.com. Previously he was a Senior Vice President of the Windows Core Operating System Division (COSD) at Microsoft where he was responsible for overseeing the development of core Windows technologies such as networking and the kernel. He was also the Executive primarily responsible for the development of Windows 2000 and Windows XP, and he held the same role for the majority of Windows Vista's development cycle. During the Windows 2000 and Windows XP development cycles, Brian would hold "Windows Information Meetings" (WIMs) in a large cafeteria, where he would encourage the team by telling jokes and reading excerpts from the Weekly World News, "The Official Newspaper of the Windows 2000 team." He would often end the meeting with the commands: "Developers, fix bugs. Testers, find bugs. PM's and everybody else, stay the hell out of the way." On August 1, 2006, Microsoft announced that Valentine would leave his post as head of COSD (many in the press speculated that this was largely tied to the failures of Windows Vista management) and pursue other opportunities within the company after the release of Vista, expected to happen in November 2006. Jon DeVaan, Senior Vice President of Engineering Excellence, would join the Platform division and eventually replace Valentine. On September 1, 2006, this transition was accelerated when Valentine left Microsoft to take a position at Amazon.com. Valentine holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Eastern Washington University.