What drives Microsoft's head of Windows?

How do you keep staff working on the largest software development project in history - a project claimed to have eaten up more man hours than putting men on the moon - motivated and focused? In Brian Valentine's case, wear a pink tutu.

Valentine is Microsoft's vice-president of development with overall responsibility for the entire Windows' product family, a job many people would love to have. He gives the impression that he works hard for his money. So why the tutu?

"Running a project of 5000 or so Type A personalities and like-to-work-hard engineers, you have to keep it fun. This is hard work. It's easy to lose focus when motivating this type of person," he explains.

The ballerina togs were, in fact, worn to raise money for charity and were first worn last year for the front cover of a calendar, helping to raise $20,000. Valentine then wore the tutu to Microsoft's national sales meeting to "liven up the audience", raising another $12,000.

Valentine, it should be said, is a man who sees his management style as a hybrid of General Patton and John Belushi. Other outfits worn in the name of motivating the team include an Elvis costume and dressing up as Santa Claus.

Clowning aside, however, Valentine is also keenly aware of the importance of his job.

"This software impacts on business lives, personal lives, society, the way people do business, and lots of other stuff," he says. "When you think about it, you realise the intense nature of exactly what it is you are doing."

That level of responsibility isn't likely to get any lower in the near future, with developments such as Whistler - the next generation of Windows - on the way. Not to mention Blackcomb, its successor, which the development team will begin working on as soon as the former ships.

Windows 2000 adoption
As far as current products goes, Valentine believes the number of desktop and notebook deployments for Windows 2000 (which began shipping in February) indicates Microsoft has done a good job.

"Since February we've sold nearly eight million desktop licences, more than we've ever sold in that PC business space. Quite a bit of that is going into not just large businesses, but smaller companies, even though we don't advertise it as a small office/home office tool," he points out.

Yet challenges remain. Most customers who are deploying Windows 2000 today are doing so around an Active Directory (AD) deployment. Valentine believes Microsoft needs to do a better job of telling people you don't have to do that.

"These types of infrastructure deployments are not 15-day projects in a big company," he argues.

As a result, a lot of baseline technologies that Microsoft needs to be deployed into the enterprise space are not being introduced as quickly as the company would like.

What Valentine advocates is installing the operating system into a Windows NT 4 or Novell environment, as it works better than the old desktop.

"Windows 2000 has been a great success. It's really that simple. While there are great benefits from using AD to roll the OS out, stuff like IntelliMirror, you can just deploy this as a new desktop.

"One of the good things is that we've got plenty of experience rolling out new software and measuring the support issues around that release. The incoming rate of Windows 2000 support calls has been around 50 per cent of what we expected. This is also a testimony of just how good a job my guys did," he says.

So how does a company choose a version of Windows 2000 Server to install? "If you are price-sensitive, or a small business that just wants file and print, then Server is your choice. An enterprise customer should standardise on Advanced Server for a line of business apps. And Data Centre is the big product, a very significant development that demonstrates just how capable we are in the enterprise space," he boasts.

Whistler and .Net
So is Windows.Net the same as Whistler? "Yes it is. Logically, it is the same. But these are just different code names for the same thing. Don't forget that .Net is not a product, it's a strategy. In Whistler we will deliver some technologies that start to integrate .Net into the desktop, stuff like Passport sign-in," he says.

"As for timing it will be next year. But if you think about what drives consumer sales there are two periods, Christmas and back-to-school, so there will be yearly releases around those."

And Blackcomb? "This is simply the next release of Windows post-Whistler. We've just named it now. When Whistler ships, we will go away and work on Blackcomb. Whistler is, first and foremost, a consumer retail-focused OS. It's what Windows ME gives you, but on top of the NT code base.

"Then it is about 64bit computing. Whistler ships with native 64bit computing from embedded to desktop to server. And finally it's about how can we make Windows 2000 even better - the 1.0 release, if you will."

At least the important questions such as 'What do we code name the next version of Windows 2000?' have been answered. Which just leaves one question: when will the tutu next get an airing?