Brian Valentine: Microsoft's senior VP for Windows development insists that major Windows 2000 bugs have been swatted
When Windows 2000 was officially launched in San Francisco, no one at Microsoft was more delighted and relieved than top executive Brian Valentine. Valentine has been riding herd over Windows 2000 development since December 1998 when he was promoted to senior vice president for Windows Development; before that, he was the guiding force behind Exchange Server. Hours after Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates unveiled the next-generation, "bet the farm" operating system in San Francisco, Valentine sat down with InfoWorld Editor in Chief Michael Vizard, Executive Producer/New Media Katherine Bull, and Associate News Editor Bob Trott to hash out some of the issues that IT managers are facing with Windows 2000 -- namely, bugs, service packs, and application compatibility.
InfoWorld: There's a story currently out there, with your name attached to it, that talks about an e-mail stating that there are approximately 64,000 bugs in Windows 2000. What's real and what's not?
Valentine: It was really taken out of context. The way we do our front-tracking system inside Microsoft is we have a RAID [Redundant Array of Independent Disks] system, which is a system where we have a single bug-tracking database that everything goes into. So if somebody sends a request to Microsoft.com, it goes into the database and somebody has to go look at it. All the suggestions people have made about the product that we didn't deal with in doing Windows 2000 are in that bug database. We have a bunch of tools that our research guys have just produced, called [Prefix Tools], that are still in the process of being developed. We're running them on the source code, and they put a bug report in the database so that somebody has to go look at it. And then we determine whether it really is a bug or not, based on whether the tool thinks it might be a bug. For example, if somebody had an issue with the Hebrew version of the product -- that hasn't shipped yet in Windows 2000 -- it would be in the bug database. So if there was a string that was mistranslated, they'd have a bug report on it, and that'd be one of those sixty-some thousand bugs. So from the standpoint of Windows 2000, we shipped with no ship-stopper issues. Every one of those open bug reports was something that just wasn't a ship stopper [for the English version of Windows 2000]. So effectively, we fixed every single ship-stopper bug. I just found it ironic that something like that would be printed completely out of context, because the thing that makes me the most mad about it is [that] it doesn't do customers any good because they get all confused about, 'What is this 60-some thousand bug thing?' And they don't know the internal context of it. It doesn't do the industry any good because now
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