Gabriel J. "Gabe" Aul, (born August 5, 1972) is the

Vice President A vice president, also director in British English, is an officer in government or business who is below the president (chief executive officer) in rank. It can also refer to executive vice presidents, signifying that the vice president is on t ...

Oculus Oculus (a term from Latin ''oculus'', meaning 'eye'), may refer to the following Architecture * Oculus (architecture), a circular opening in the centre of a dome or in a wall Arts, entertainment, and media * ''Oculus'' (film), a 2013 American ...

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. He was previously the Corporate

(CVP) of Windows & Devices Group (WDG), Engineering Systems (1ES) team at

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...

. He was appointed as VP on 31 July 2015, following the launch of

Windows 10 Windows 10 is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It is the direct successor to Windows 8.1, which was released nearly two years earlier. It was released to manufacturing on July 15, 2015, and later to retail on J ...

on 29 July 2015. He led the

Windows Insider Program Windows Insider is an open software testing program by Microsoft that allows users globally who own a valid license of Windows 11, Windows 10, or Windows Server to register for pre-release builds of the operating system previously only accessible ...

until June 1, 2016, where he was succeeded by

Dona Sarkar Dona Sarkar is a software engineer, a multi-published author, a public speaker and the owner of a fashion business. She is thDirector of Technology for Microsoft Accessibility.Previously, she led an advocacy team for the Power Platform, a low-cod ...

Career

Aul started Microsoft's Security Response team for

Internet Explorer Internet Explorer (formerly Microsoft Internet Explorer and Windows Internet Explorer, commonly abbreviated IE or MSIE) is a series of graphical user interface, graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft which was used in the Microsoft Wind ...

in 1996. Aul was later part of a team that started Microsoft's Sustained Engineering group in

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

, responsible for delivering

hotfix A hotfix or quick-fix engineering update (QFE update) is a single, cumulative package that includes information (often in the form of one or more files) that is used to address a problem in a software product (i.e., a software bug). Typically, hot ...

es and

service pack In computing, a service pack comprises a collection of updates, fixes, or enhancements to a software program delivered in the form of a single installable package. Companies often release a service pack when the number of individual patches to a ...

s to customers. Aul led the effort to build

Microsoft's Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washingt ...

first product

telemetry Telemetry is the in situ data collection, collection of measurements or other data at remote points and their automatic data transmission, transmission to receiving equipment (telecommunication) for monitoring. The word is derived from the Gr ...

systems. Before then,

had no idea about how many problems were occurring on customer systems, nor were they able to debug them. Aul led part of the team creating the technologies to allow upload of crash, hang, and other failure data (

Windows Error Reporting Windows Error Reporting (WER) (codenamed Watson) is a crash reporting technology introduced by Microsoft with Windows XP and included in later Windows versions and Windows Mobile 5.0 and 6.0. Not to be confused with the Dr. Watson debugging ...

) as well as

anonymous data collection system for usage data (Customer Experience Improvement Program.) Aul won several engineering awards, patents, and published a paper based on this work. After

Windows Vista Windows Vista is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was the direct successor to Windows XP, which was released five years before, at the time being the longest time span between successive releases of ...

, Aul started the Program Management team working on Performance for Windows, with Michael Fortin who led the Development team. Aul and his team spent 3 years working on Windows 7, the first edition of Windows ever that used less resources (memory, CPU, disk) than its predecessor. Aul was promoted to Director and expanded his team to include reliability and security, and for Windows 8 they bested Windows 7 on those dimensions. For Windows 10; Aul was running an even further expanded team (adding

Data Science Data science is an interdisciplinary field that uses scientific methods, processes, algorithms and systems to extract or extrapolate knowledge and insights from noisy, structured and unstructured data, and apply knowledge from data across a br ...

to his other “

Fundamentals Fundamental may refer to: * Foundation of reality * Fundamental frequency, as in music or phonetics, often referred to as simply a "fundamental" * Fundamentalism, the belief in, and usually the strict adherence to, the simple or "fundamental" idea ...

” role) and was able to lead the effort to enable Flighting and Feedback for

's "Windows as a

Service Service may refer to: Activities * Administrative service, a required part of the workload of university faculty * Civil service, the body of employees of a government * Community service, volunteer service for the benefit of a community or a pu ...

" strategy. As part of that, Aul started the

and got to be the face of the effort for a while. Gabriel stepped down from his role of running the

on 1 June 2016, citing that he couldn't "give 100%" to both the Insider Program and his other job on the Engineering Systems Team at once. On September 8, 2017, Gabriel Aul celebrated his 25th anniversary working at

. In 2019, Gabe Aul has left

for Facebook's

team.

Patents

# Method and system for downloading updates for software installation - Filed: September 16, 1999 , Issued: December 10, 2002 # Method and system for an incidental feedback platform - Filed: April 22, 2005 , Issued: June 24, 2008 # Device emulation to facilitate data transfer - Filed: March 9, 2006 , Issued: January 10, 2012

References

* * * *

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Aul, Gabe 1972 births Living people Microsoft people